Electronic Book Review - postmodernismhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/postmodernism
enAnd the Last Shall Be the Firsthttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/recognized
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<div class="field-item even">Ralph Clare</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2013-07-08</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A review of </span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">William Gaddis, ‘The Last of Something’: Critical Essays</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">. Eds. Crystal Alberts, Christopher </span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Leise, and Birger Vanwesenbeeck. North Carolina: McFarland, 2010.</span></p>
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<p class="p3">In <em><strong>William Gaddis,‘The Last of Something’</strong></em>, editors Crystal Alberts, Christopher Leise, and Birger Vanwesenbeeck bring together emerging and established William Gaddis scholars in a welcome addition to the modest, but growing, corpus of Gaddis criticism. Not quite as ambitious and theoretically unified as Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers’ <strong><em>Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System </em></strong>(2007), this newer essay collection is more for the hardcore Gaddis reader and harkens back to John Kuehl and Steven Moore’s collection, <strong><em>In Recognition of William Gaddis </em></strong>(1984). Indeed, the editors’ introductory remark that <strong><em>‘The Last of Something’ </em></strong>“looks to update the body of thought on Gaddis’ fiction by emphasizing its traditional and innovative aspects” (3) establishes this latest collection, curiously, as a kind of link between the two earlier books. True to the editors’ vision, the essays in <em>‘<strong>The Last of Something’</strong></em> are wide-ranging, revisiting familiar themes in Gaddis criticism as well breaking new critical ground.</p>
<p class="p3">The “traditional” side of Gaddis criticism manifests itself in several ways throughout these essays, though not in a reductive or categorical way. Some of the traditionalists attack what they perceive to be the art of critical excess in Gaddis criticism. Essays by Crystal Alberts, Joseph Conway, and Birger Vanwesenbeeck, for example, take exception to certain aspects of the postmodernization of Gaddis. In particular, Alberts and Conway aim their critical sights on John Johnston’s seminal postmodern reading of Gaddis in <em><strong>Carnival of Repetition: William Gaddis’ The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory </strong></em>(1990), though they do so with all due respect to Johnston. As one might imagine, Johnston’s breakthrough reading of Gaddis placed the author’s work within the then current literary and theoretical paradigm and, in short, critically reinvented Gaddis for a new generation of readers—Johnston’s author was a sexy, pomo Gaddis, not so much a cranky late modernist, or even a reluctant early postmodernist. This was certainly not your grandfather’s, or perhaps your father’s, Gaddis, nor, as these essays argue, was it probably Gaddis’ Gaddis.</p>
<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Thus, in “Mapping William Gaddis: The Man, <strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Recognitions</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">, and His Time,” Crystal Alberts’ contests Johnston’s claim that “there is no stability of language within Gaddis’ texts” (14). Drawing from her work on the Gaddis archives at Washington University, St. Louis, Alberts offers an interesting examination of how Gaddis transformed his own European wanderings into Wyatt Gwyon’s pilgrimages in </span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Recognitions</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">, thereby demonstrating a linguistically based “geography” that “creates a map of the novel’s structure” (14). Alberts does spend some time justifying this mapping: on the one hand, notes Alberts, Gaddis’ work needs to be rescued from a postmodern packaging of it as a mere scrabble bag of sliding signifiers; on the other, his work must avoid being slated into an easy binary of biography=textual meaning, since “Gaddis did not want hunters of sources and personal information to kill the text and make the author its trophy” (10). While this shows a respect for Gaddis’ artistic views, it seems to me an unnecessary theoretical hem-haw. The fact is that “(auto)biographical” criticism, no matter Eliot’s (and Gaddis’ inherited) modernist worries, is simply not reductive of the work itself but is rather</span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">—</span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">when employed sensitively</span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">—</span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">expansive of it. Indeed, there is something amusing about an important, yet woefully underappreciated, writer worrying about his unknown person taking precedence over his little-read work, and ironically so when such posing only strengthens the image of the writer/artist in many readers’ opinions as someone who is above concerns of conventional success and market considerations, as Pierre Bordieu’s </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>The Field of Cultural Production </strong></em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">(1993) makes clear. The “(auto)biographical” criticism of the kind Alberts engages in here (and in her essay in </span><strong style="line-height: 1.538em;"><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Paper Empire</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">) is welcome, and we should look forward to more of it in the future.</span></span></p>
<p class="p3"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The same concern with theoretically straightjacketing Gaddis’ works fuels Joseph Conway’s “Failing Criticism: </span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Recognitions</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">.” Similar to Alberts, Conway takes exception to Johnston’s and other critics’ readings of Gaddis, which, he claims, “mistake the position of critical partiality for the fullness of interpretative totality” (70). In response, Conway cites Gregory Comnes’s method put forth in </span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> (1994) that respects the heterogeneity of Gaddis’ work. Though this method supposedly justifies Conway’s “stray[ing] somewhat from establishing an overarching thesis” (72), it does not make for the smoothest of readings. Conway’s essay is well-written, occasionally insightful, and provides an interesting comparison of Hemmingway’s and Gaddis’ prose and aesthetic visions (a comparison sparked by a Gaddis notebook entry on Hemmingway), but its tracing of several intertextual allusions (Pope, Ovid, and Eliot) in one passage of </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>The Recognitions</strong> </em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">leads to extended visits to the sources of these allusions. While this is meant to underscore the “distracted” quality of Gaddis’ work, it is unfortunately reproduced in Conway’s essay. To be sure, from time to time a reflexive look at the trends of literary theory as they have affected, and been affected by, an object of study is a healthy and necessary thing. But to point out the failures of criticism does not a criticism make. One benefit of providing a clear theoretical foundation to a critique is that it automatically works against any kind of “interpretive totality” by laying out its assumptions for all to see—and in a clear and orderly fashion. Moreover, what we decidedly </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">do </em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">get when we place Johnston in dialogue with Steven Moore and other critics</span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">—</span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Conway included</span>—<span style="line-height: 1.538em;">are multiple points of view on Gaddis’ work from radically different voices, which is the very thing Conway desires of criticism in the first place, and, ironically, that which provides him the very frame for his argument.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Birger Vanwesenbeeck chastises the postmodern and posthuman turn in Gaddis studies for excommunicating religion from their critical congregations in “</span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Agapē Agape</strong>: The Last Christian Novel(s)</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">.” Vanwesenbeeck returns to Gaddis’ comment that </span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Recognitions </em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">constitutes the “last Christian novel” and argues for seeing the writer as trying to “write himself loose from a religious doctrine, which […] he loathed as much as he […] realized its deep contiguity to the art of fiction” (88). For Vanwesenbeeck, this bind comes to the fore in </span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Agapē Agape</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">, as Gaddis’ views of (artistic) community are communicated through the metaphor of Christian communion via the Eucharist. Vanwesenbeeck gives a creative “eucharistic reading” of the “wafer-like” novella, whereby “the dying narrator offers up his narrative—in the manner of the Christian host—for it to be internalized by the reader” (97). This is an ingenious reading that meets the cybernetic readings of Gaddis in the heart of the heart of their system. Moreover, Vanwesenbeeck sees Gaddis’ Christian-influenced notion of community as “an awareness […] of the impossibility for any Western writer to conceive of community outside of the Christian paradigm of communion” (98) and an attempt “to redefine </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">agapē</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> from a more individualized point of view,” or what Gaddis called the “‘</span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">self </em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">who can do more’” (99). Gaddis’ attempt to out-write Christianity and to end, outright, its influence on his work, Vanwesenbeeck suggests, means the “last Christian novel” is perhaps not the termination of a series, but instead the most recent example of it.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">There is also much in the way of more “traditional” criticism in this collection that is not so anxious about refuting a certain sort of postmodern Gaddis and that most certainly could have found a home in </span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">In Recognition of William Gaddis</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">. Moreover, these essays are fresh and insightful, suggesting that employing fashionable theoretical paradigms is not always necessary for writing original criticism, even in these so-called theoretical end-days. Among these essays is John Soutter’s “</span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Recognitions</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> and </span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Carpenter’s Gothic</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">: Gaddis’ Anti-Pauline Novels,” which, like Vanwesenbeeck’s essay, explores the fraught theme of religion in Gaddis’ works. Soutter puts Gaddis into an anti-Pauline tradition, especially as formulated by the philosophical work of Hans Vaihinger, which criticizes the practice of placing a representation, fiction, or systematized belief before immediate first-hand experience. In this view, Paul’s mediation of Christ’s teachings is a distortion of Christ’s words, especially because the tentative medium becomes the institutionalized message. Soutter argues that the effect, in </span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Recognitions </em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">and </span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">CG</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">, is that characters frequently submit themselves to the manipulated narratives of others in an attempt at secular salvation. Thus, while “Gaddis’ novels condemn institutional perspectives” they “are all imbued with a religious impulse” (121 and 125). </span></p>
<p class="p3">Lisa Siraganian’s “‘A disciplined nostalgia,’: Gaddis and the Modern Art Object” gives a new perspective on Wyatt Gwyon’s, and by extension Gaddis’, views on modern art. Moving past earlier critical assessments focusing either on art as redemption or art as simulacra, Siraganian places <strong><em>The Recognitions</em></strong> in the context of the New York Art scene of the ’40s and ’50s, arguing that Wyatt’s aesthetics imply a different “theory of art and the art object’s relation to the beholder” (111). This becomes the very incorporation of “theory” into art itself, wherein Wyatt’s “forgeries are intended as both an art object and a form of criticism” (113). Siraganiain’s discussion of the changing trends in art theory and criticism at the time works well to spur a reconsideration of Wyatt’s aesthetics and Gaddis’ view of modern art.</p>
<p class="p3"><strong>‘<em>The Last of Something’</em> </strong>also hosts a wonderful entry by William H. Gass, Gaddis’ long time friend. In “The Kvetch, the Bitch, and the Rant,” Gass, in his typically supple prose, offers an amusing generic typology of one of Gaddis’ favorite formal devices (the rant), especially as displayed in <strong><em>Carpenter’s Gothic</em></strong>. Gass describes the rant as “angry in tone, blasphemous in expression, pell-mell in delivery, built of associations rather than logical connections” and ultimately “driven by despair” (27). The rant, it seems, fits well with Sacvan Berkovitch’s definition of the American Jeremiad. The kvetch and bitch each have their own provenance too. “The kvetch,” Gass writes, “is hinged to the rant like a door to a frame: the kvetch is particular, the rant general; the kvetch intimate, the rant impersonal” (27). Opposed to this is the bitch, which is “low toned,” common, and not as personal or “purely egocentric” as the kvetch. By this definition, Job is the kvetcher <em>par excellence</em>. And if I were allowed my own Berco<em>bitch </em>here it would be to ask for more regarding the relationship between the rant and the Jeremiad. However, Gass’ new rhetorical genres, or sub-genres, offer a different and humorous way of conceiving of the secularized version of the Jeremiad, and not by merely calling it an anti-Jeremiad. </p>
<p class="p3"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Christopher J. Knight’s essay, “Trying to Make Negative Things Do the Work of Positive Ones: Gaddis and Apophaticism,” positions Gaddis as part of different tradition (one distinguished by Eliot and Evelyn Waugh) than critics have heretofore placed him in. Indeed, Knight posits a tradition that weaves together the Coleridgean “willful suspension of disbelief” with satire by the common thread of their “apophatic character.” This tradition is instructive for Gaddis because it “tend[s] to approach the positive […] via Eliotian indirection and Waughian satire” (59). Knight even reads Gaddis, and Eliot, in the tradition of New England writers, at least because each writer imagined himself as such, and examines their stances on spirituality and Christianity as an institution. In light of this discussion, Knight shows how Gaddis is not unlike many twentieth century authors in his inability and refusal to put his faith in any system, religious or otherwise, that proclaims absolute “knowledge.” Instead, Gaddis employs the “willful suspension of disbelief” and ambiguity in his writing as “negatives,” so to speak, that might compel “positive” outcomes. Knight’s essay is wide-ranging in its artistic and intellectual references—among them Kierkagaard, William James, Conrad, Paul Ricoeur, Shakespeare, Twain, and Tennyson—and, as such, it is as rich and tapestried as Gaddis’ own work, and surely comprises a formalist homage of sorts. </span></p>
<p class="p3">Tim Conley’s “This Little Prodigy Went to Market: The Education of J R” gives a sharp reading of <strong><em>J R </em></strong>as a Bildungsroman starring the young J R Vansant. Employing Rousseau’s notions of childhood innocence developed in <strong><em>Emile</em></strong>,<em> </em>Conley argues that Gaddis’ novel depicts J R not as an inherently ruthless and greedy child, but as an innocent babe, at best a product of a cutthroat, “play to win” capitalist society, one in which schooling and education are merely Gradgrindian and factory-like exercises. “Education,” Conley claims, “is the absent centre of the book” (sic, 130). Conley even extends Gaddis’ “educational treatise” to Edward Bast’s failed attempt to teach J R the value of Bach and art in general, since Bast turns out to be “no better an expositor of the significance of music” than is J R’s terrible music teacher (135). This rather controversial interpretation of a key scene involving one of the more sympathetic artist-characters in the book (a scene that many critics cite as evidence of the postmodern age’s hostility to true art) is thought provoking. If even the artists and caring teachers in the novel can be implicated in the hegemony of cutthroat capitalism through their failure to counteract its teachings, then J R’s “innocence” means he is not responsible for his actions—though at what point before he stands, all grown up, in front of Congress to answer allegations of financial chicanery in Gaddis’ “J R Up to Date” (1987) <em>does</em> he become responsible for his actions? Nonetheless, this claim allows Conley to further his argument that Gaddis does not criticize J R’s type of “innocent” greed and, by extension, capitalism <em>per se</em>. Notwithstanding whether or not it is fair to endow Gaddis’ vision of children, and J R especially, in a manner as idealistic as Rousseau’s, Conley’s essay offers a compelling reading of the education of J R and the failures of the American educational system, and how this ties into Gaddis’ guarded censure of the capitalist system. </p>
<p class="p3"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A touch of theory, however, does leave a faint print on </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">‘<strong>The Last of Something’</strong></em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">, as evidenced in Christopher Leise’s essay “The Power of Babel: Art, Entropy, and Aporia in the Novels.” Leise, continuing the systems theory turn in Gaddis criticism initiated by </span><strong><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">Paper Empire </em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">(and particularly in Stephen Schryer’s essay therien, “The Aesthetics of First- and Second-Order Cybernetics in William Gaddis’ </span><em style="line-height: 1.538em;">J R</em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">”), applies the concepts of second-order cybernetic theory to Gaddis’ “difficult” entropy-mimicking prose. For Leise, the reader’s role as a second-order observer of textual chaos, who can see the blind spots of others (though not her own), allows her “to seize upon the positive potential of confusion” (40). As such, Gaddis’ art is one that “plays at aporia” and works against “America’s desire to simplify the complex, to apprehend what is inherently elusive, while constructing potential pathways […] toward its improvement” (50). </span></p>
<p class="p3">Perhaps the most intriguing and original essay in this collection, and certainly the most theoretically novel, is Mathieu Duplay’s “Field’s Ripe for Harvest: <strong><em>Carpenter’s Gothic</em></strong>, Africa, and the Avatars of Biopolitical Control.” Duplay’s piece gives a much-needed postcolonial reading of <strong><em>Carpenter’s Gothic</em> </strong>that few other critics have attempted. Focusing his analysis on biopolitics in the novel, Duplay turns to Georgio Agamben’s work on sovereignty and the state of exception in the modern world, in which Agamben reveals the paradoxes at the heart of Western law and politics. Of particular use to Duplay is the notion of <em>homo sacer</em>, a term Agamben takes from ancient Roman law that referred to a person whose societal status meant he could be killed by anyone with impunity, yet could not be legally sacrificed to the gods. Abandoned before the law and society, <em>homo sacer</em> is a figure for those excluded by society who are reduced to, or treated as if they are merely, “bare life,” or life at its most basic biological state of existence. <em>Homo Sacer</em>, however, is also necessary for marking or circumscribing the very limits of law, the sovereign, and the State. Indeed, the reduction of <em>homo sacer </em>to “bare life” or “bios” reveals the fundamentally biopolitical nature of Western law. Duplay goes on to explain how biopolitical control is waged in <strong><em>Carpenter’s Gothic</em></strong>, not only in the more obvious political, economic, and religious machinations the novel portrays, but also through the ways in which the characters’ bodies and behaviors are affected in their day-to-day lives (particularly through a keen reading of “rifts” in the novel, form the Great Rift to those of interpersonal relations). Duplay goes so far as to read the characters themselves as examples of <em>homines sacri</em>.</p>
<p class="p3">To claim that the characters in the <strong><em>Carpenter’s Gothic</em></strong> are <em>homines sacri</em>, however, should give us pause. While in <strong><em>Home Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life</em> </strong>(1998) Agamben argues that the Nazi death camp is the model of society today and its prisoner the <em>homo sacer </em>(166-180), he gives no specific contemporary examples of <em>homo sacer</em>. Critics sympathetic to Agamben’s work suggest <em>homo sacer </em>is a concept useful when considering Brazil’s <em>favelas </em>or even the slums of India. In any event, we are talking here about the effects of biopolitical power <em>on those radically excluded</em> from society and “sacrificed” in the name of civilization. The novel’s indirect mention of the many African peoples suffering from malnutrition or abandoned by their by governments in the midst of civil wars—the “souls” that Reverend Ude wants to harvest—are more properly examples of <em>homines sacri</em> than are a few middle-to-upper class New Yorkers gathered in a dilapidated house on the Hudson. Liz, in her position as secretary to all who walk through the office she calls home, is perhaps the closest to this level of exclusion, but if we were to seek examples of <em>homines sacri </em>in America, we might begin with the millions of undocumented workers living and working in this country without any security or rights. </p>
<p class="p3">Nevertheless, Duplay is right to examine how the characters in <strong><em>Carpenter’s Gothic</em></strong> are affected by biopower and biopolitical production. It is simply a different, and less drastic (if nevertheless prophetic), version of biopolitical control that we see at work in the novel than is evidenced in certain parts of the world today, and one with different immediate effects. Moreover, in a move sympatico with much Gaddis criticism that eschews excessive theory, Duplay links the notion of biopower to Gaddis’ use of language in the novel, which suggests that “the forcible reduction of human existence to ‘bare life’ cannot be resisted unless the working of language are more correctly apprehended” (156). Thus, Duplay, like Leise, balances a new theoretical reading of <strong><em>CG</em></strong> by joining it with the oft-addressed critical function of Gaddis’ aesthetics. </p>
<p class="p3">Finally, in “After Gaddis: Data Storage and the Novel,” Stephen J. Burn rightly takes Jonathan Franzen to task for his one-time dis of Gaddis in his 2002 <em><strong>New Yorker</strong> </em>article, “Mr. Difficult.” Burn’s discussion of Gaddis’ skepticism of the novel as an encyclopedia or storehouse of data undercuts Franzen’s own denouncement of the novel’s ability to capture and preserve “reality.” Gaddis, Burn argues, “does not simply use the novel to store data, but rather explores the negative impact endlessly proliferating information has upon the lives of his characters” (163). More importantly, Burn establishes the influence of Gaddis’ encyclopedic tendencies not just in Franzen’s early work but also in the work of Richard Powers and David Foster Wallace. In this context, Franzen’s love/hate relationship with Gaddis clearly reveals a Bloomian anxiety of influence, which Burn deftly demonstrates by calling attention to the striking similarities between the characters of Chip in Franzen’s <strong><em>The Corrections </em></strong>and Oscar in Gaddis’ <strong><em>A Frolic of his Own</em></strong>. Thus, Burn reveals that even after Franzen’s turn away from writing “postmodern” encyclopedic novels to penning more accessible realist works, the influence of Gaddis remains. Burn’s essay is a necessary, yet careful, look at the touchy subject of literary influence, especially when dealing with a generation of fairly young writers who both resist certain postmodern influences, yet have clearly been shaped by them. </p>
<p class="p3">While several essays in the collection deal with Gaddis’ latest and posthumously published <strong><em>Agapē Agape</em></strong>, little attention is devoted to <strong><em>A Frolic of One’s Own</em></strong>, which is perhaps Gaddis’ least critically explored text. There was perhaps a chance here to cover some critical territory still sorely in need of exploration. Too, though many of the essays overlap in their concerns, some of them are isolated and, as a result, the book’s flow compromised. The collection could have benefited from being organized into sections dealing with religion, rhetoric, aesthetics, etc. Yet, all in all <strong><em>William Gaddis, ‘The Last of Something’ </em></strong>is a reminder that this is certainly not the last word in Gaddis criticism but the beginning of <em>something</em> <em>more</em>.</p>
<p class="p4"><strong>Works Cited and Consulted</strong></p>
<p class="p2">Agamben, Giorgio. <strong><em>Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life</em></strong>. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford<span style="line-height: 1.538em;">: Stanford UP, 1998.</span></p>
<p class="p2">Bercovitch, Sacvan. <strong><em>The American Jeremiad</em>.</strong> Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978.</p>
<p class="p2">Bordieu, Pierre. <strong><em>The Field of Cultural Production</em></strong>. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.</p>
<p class="p2">Comnes, Gregory. <strong><em>The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis</em></strong>. Gainsville: UP <span style="line-height: 1.538em;">of Florida, 1994. </span></p>
<p class="p2">Gaddis, William. <strong><em>The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings</em></strong>. Ed. Joseph <span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Tabbi. New York: Penguin, 2002. </span></p>
<p class="p2">Johnston, John. <strong><em>Carnival of Repetition: William Gaddis’ </em>The Recognitions <em>and Postmodern </em></strong><strong style="line-height: 1.538em;"><em>Theory</em></strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">. Philadelphia: U Penn P, 1990.</span></p>
<p class="p2">Kuehl, John and Steven Moore, eds. <strong><em>In Recognition of William Gaddis</em></strong>. New York: Syracuse <span style="line-height: 1.538em;">UP, 1984.</span></p>
<p class="p2">Tabbi, Jospeh and Rone Shavers, eds. <strong><em>Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System</em></strong>.<span style="line-height: 1.538em;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2007. </span></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/william-gaddis">william gaddis</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a></div></div></div>Wed, 08 May 2013 15:06:30 +0000Ryan Brooks2278 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/recognized#commentsThe Latest Wordhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/latest
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<div class="markup">by</div>
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<div class="field-item even">Curtis White</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2012-04-14</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p> In October of 2011, I posted an essay titled <a href="http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/roundtable/the-late-word.php" class="outbound">“The Late Word”</a> concerning the devolution of literary publishing on the <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Lapham’s Quarterly</span></strong></em> website.</p>
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<p>The argument of that essay can be simplified in the following few points:</p>
<ol><li>Literature has always been about the struggle for the institutional authority to say what would count as literature;</li>
<li>With the slow death of bookstores and the publishing industry, literature seems to be disappearing for lack of interest; publishers aren’t interested, and agents, critics, the reading public, and even the postmodern professoriate (with its enduring fascination with popular culture, and its bad faith “celebration” of multiculturalism) are now so indifferent that the very concept of literature is on the verge of extinction;</li>
<li>What is taking literature’s place appears to be the Great Library of Amazon, a super-sized Babel made all of “content units”;</li>
<li>This is not necessarily cause for grief because it was never literature that we cared most about (“it is damned from one end to the other”); what we have cared about is literature’s socio-spiritual capacity for destabilizing the familiar and revealing the Real, especially that Real in which <em><span class="lightEmphasis">change</span></em> is real (Williams again: “it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is upon it”) (<span class="booktitle">Korea in Hell</span> 16)</li>
</ol><p>There were many comments on my essay left at <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Lapham’s</span></strong></em>, most of them dismissive or hostile. One of the things that has been most discouraging to me in recent years is the tendency among some of my readers to substitute familiar ideas for the unfamiliar ideas that I’m actually trying to develop. So, with <em><strong><span class="booktitle">The Middle Mind</span></strong></em>, Dwight McDonald’s “middle brow” was pasted over my idea-that the products of mass culture are successfully “passing” for art-just as if a poster for the circus - coming soon! - were pasted over a denunciation of clowns and tiny dogs.</p>
<p>In the present case, most of the comments seemed to reflect the idea that I was just another mourner for the passing of book publishing and something called literature. The following complaints were made (I’ve tried to list them in some sort of logical order):</p>
<ol><li>I was wrong to worry that literature would die with the end of book publishing;</li>
<li>Literature will thrive just as it always has because readers find books they like and tell their friends about them (that’s what Twitter is for!);</li>
<li>There is no need to worry about Amazon; it’s simply the new vehicle for literature just as the printed word was once a new vehicle that replaced scribes and declamators;</li>
<li>I’m so last century.</li>
</ol><p>Given how far modern literary publishing has come from its origins with publisher/bookstores like Murray’s in London during the rise of English Romanticism (see <a href="http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/roundtable/the-late-word.php" class="outbound">original essay</a>), and how concentrated it is now in a high-tech corporate monopoly, it’s a little late to get weepy over its demise. My argument is: let it go. It’s always been compromised. The institutions of literature have always worked against the <em><span class="lightEmphasis">life</span></em> of the work of art as much as they have worked for it.</p>
<p>Historically, literary institutions have done two things well. First, they have <em><span class="lightEmphasis">managed</span></em> the unruliness of language by creating canons of the major, the minor, and the non-canonical, aka the irrelevant. If the large part of the work of the poem/novel is to “enstrange” the world as we know it and open it up to the possibility of alternate arrangements, any canon can only serve the opposite purpose: to stabilize. In other words, in literary canons the work of art becomes part of an ideological apparatus, whether religious, aristocratic, capitalist, socialist, or even ballyhooed multicultural.</p>
<p>Herbert Marcuse puts it this way in <em><strong><span class="booktitle">One Dimensional Man</span></strong></em>:</p>
<blockquote><p>What they [the Romantics] recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it. The great surrealist art and literature of the ‘Twenties and ‘Thirties has still recaptured them in their subversive and liberating function … Some of these [surrealist] images pertain to contemporary literature and survive in its most advanced creations. What has been invalidated is their subversive force, their destructive content - their truth … The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. (63-64)</p></blockquote>
<p>Thus is literature damned.</p>
<p>This should not be understood as a renunciation of the works in themselves. Taken on their own terms, almost <em><span class="lightEmphasis">all</span></em> of the individual works within the established art canons - whether literature, music, or painting - were, in their time, “subversive,” to use Marcuse’s word, in one way or another, and beautifully so. Unhappily, it is never the subversive Beethoven or Wagner that is presented in symphony halls. No one introduces <em><strong><span class="albumtitle">Das Rheingold</span></strong></em> by describing how Wagner paid for hand grenades in the Dresden uprising of 1849, or that his depiction of the alienated labor of the Niebelungen was very likely derived (through his friendship with Bakunin) from Marx. It is only the mystified aura of their canonical “greatness” that is displayed. (And yet within this mystified aura you can still feel the artist, like the beat of an animal heart, slowly approaching through fog.)</p>
<p>Let us remember: Beethoven refused every authorized role he was offered. He was rumpled, rude, and misanthropic. He dedicated a work to the French Revolution in spite of the fact that he lived on the patronage of the Austrian nobility, and in spite of the fact that in 1802 Napoleon was preparing for war with Austria. Anyone else would have been hanged for sedition. He didn’t bite the hand that fed him; he ate it. Just as importantly, he refused the formal orthodoxy of classicism. In the fourth movement of his <em><strong><span class="albumtitle">Second Symphony</span></strong></em>, his last work in something like the classical idiom, he actually <em><span class="lightEmphasis">farts</span></em> on classicism. After that, the “new path” of the <em><span class="lightEmphasis">Eroica</span>. </em>Beethoven’s music is a refusal of all reigning ideologies and orthodoxies that would not see its equal - as social revolt - until Jimi Hendrix played the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock.</p>
<p>This brings me to the second thing that canons do well: they <em><span class="lightEmphasis">celebrate their victims</span></em>. True, most artists do yearn for the sort of enduring fame that canonization claims to offer (deluded though that fame is), but the power of their work, when it is authentic, is always in its indifference to what the critics and canonizers think. Of the Romantics, Keats was the most keenly aware of this difficulty. In his letters he wrote, “There is no greater Sin after the seven deadly than to flatter oneself into an idea of being a great Poet” (261). And, “with a great poet [sic!] the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration” (277). And yet, scrupulous though he was, Keats took consolation in predicting that after his death he would be acknowledged as one of the “English poets.” In short, he felt that there was a place in the canon - right next to Spenser, down a few seats from Shakespeare - waiting for him.</p>
<p>The ossification of reputations in Great Traditions is like the summer powwow to which white people flock in their minivans in order to don war bonnets, paint their faces, and celebrate their genocidal “heritage.”</p>
<p>Ah! Beethoven! Ah! Jimi! Just more dead injuns.</p>
<p>As for the promise of digital culture and our Amazonian future, is it possible to have there a literature that works through the spirit of change, of enstrangement, of refusal, and in which the sense of Beauty (whatever Keats meant by that vexed word) overcomes every other consideration?</p>
<p>I suppose. But it’s helpful to remember just what a rich and difficult thing Keatsian beauty is. In a sense, it enstranges by re-collecting an object’s original intimacy. It’s as if Keat’s is recalling the thing’s true familiarity. The poem breaks the crust of habitual expectation and stereotype by abandoning the self’s ordinary perspective in an act of sympathy for the existential integrity of others, even if only for Keats’s famous sparrow. This is negative capability.</p>
<p>Can this deference to the dignity of being happen in the context of a Web dominated by corporations whose job is basically to create rigid market identities so it can better sell them? Is it possible to do your business through Amazon and be <em><span class="lightEmphasis">alienated</span>, which is to say <span class="lightEmphasis">outside</span></em> of it? (“Oh, my Amazon sales number broke into the hundreds! My editor will be thrilled!”) You won’t easily find the particularity of Keats’s sparrow there, or Marianne Moore’s toads, or Williams’ wheelbarrow, or Pound’s station in the metro. Worse yet, from what I can see, many writers and poets seem all-too-willing to play the game, creating fan pages and websites for their own brand. The writing community, such as it is, seems almost sick with desire for this ephemeral grace. Every genius and every deluded poseur proudly displays her own granular meme, blogging, posting, or selling a book for $.99 on Kindle. In the World According to Amazon the point is that it is not possible to be alienated because <em><span class="lightEmphasis">there is nothing outside of it</span></em>! The Web is, in the worst possible sense, the night in which all cows are black.</p>
<p>And yet, it is because of this outside that aesthetic controversies in the arts, since the romantic era and until very recently, have been so fierce. For example, in French painting around 1800 the rivalries between neo-classicists (school of David), archaists (Ingres), and romantic colorists (Delacroix) were vicious not because of a desire for official recognition (they all hated the Salon) but because they all desired to define the dominant tendency of the moment which in turn would determine the world of the future, on the <em><span class="lightEmphasis">outside</span></em>. Ingres’s advocacy of the line and clear drafting was aesthetic, of course, but it was always an ethical and social aesthetics. The artist’s job was to describe <em><span class="lightEmphasis">virtue</span></em> for his audience. Ingres’s paintings tried to say, “This is the most desirable world of the future.” On the other hand, Delacroix’s Rubensesque orgies of color smelled of “brimstone.” All of this took place in the communal context of the artist’s <em><span class="lightEmphasis">atelier</span></em>, his studio, where students and advocates gathered to view new work, produce their own, and <em><span class="lightEmphasis">talk</span></em>.</p>
<p>For us, now, it seems to me, the only future being fought over is either technical or economic: in what form will the arts survive in ever-shifting<em> <span class="lightEmphasis">markets</span></em>. But all questions of virtue will be handled by technicians and economists.</p>
<p>As Andrei Codrescu wrote in his prescient book <strong><em><span class="booktitle">The Disappearance of the Outside</span></em></strong>:</p>
<div style="padding-left: 30px;">The notion of community has been stripped of its direction. No longer does community - <em><span class="lightEmphasis">any</span></em> community - stand outside the State, in direct challenge to it. All communities have been reoriented through a neat trick of generalization to <em><span class="lightEmphasis">become</span></em> the State, an electronic Superstate that is a combination of traditional nationalism and electronic globalism. When community was a means of resistance, it was constituted to point from the inside<em> <span class="lightEmphasis">out</span></em>: it proceeded from a center of internal concerns to make progressively wider contacts with the outside world. The community redesigned by the State points inward: it is a producer of silence. (sic, 197)</div>
<p>In the era of the Web, we might now add, yes, but it is a <em><span class="lightEmphasis">voluble</span></em> silence.</p>
<p>Inseparable from this social damage is a very personal damage. The Web is the largest, most sophisticated diversion machine in human history. As entertainments always have, the Web diverts us from thinking about how empty we are. As Pascal wrote, “The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries” (6). We fill ourselves with the Web’s chatter and the Web’s busyness, but when our laptops and smart phones are taken from us we are thrown immediately back into our ancient human anxiety about being nothing. If we can’t text, and tweet, and email, we discover ourselves to be ontologically <em><span class="lightEmphasis">empty</span></em>, just as we’ve always been. And so, in a panic, back to that cold digital embrace we return.</p>
<p>William Carlos Williams, just one more time: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for <em><span class="lightEmphasis">lack</span></em> / of what is found there” (emphasis added, “Asphodel” 161-162).</p>
<p>We are creatures of lack, <em><span class="lightEmphasis">manqué</span></em>, as Sartre put it grimly. The Web reassures us about the hole at the center of us by providing its endless chatter. The leveling effect of Amazon makes even the best intended artist or thinker a mere “content provider” for that hole whether she likes it or not. Even this essay succumbs to that implacable dynamic, God help me.</p>
<p>And yet, I think the situation is more or less as Marshall McLuhan saw it in the ’60s. On the one hand, as he acknowledged in his famous <strong><span class="booktitle">Playboy</span></strong> interview:</p>
<blockquote><p>As a man molded within the literate Western tradition, I do not personally cheer the dissolution of that tradition through the electric involvement of all the senses: I don’t enjoy the destruction of neighborhoods by high-rises or revel in the pain of identity quest. No one could be less enthusiastic about these radical changes than myself. (267)</p></blockquote>
<p>But, against his own nature, he was forced to acknowledge:</p>
<blockquote><p>Even if I opposed them or thought them disastrous, I couldn’t stop them, so why waste my time lamenting? As Carlyle said of author Margaret Fuller after she remarked, ‘I accept the Universe’: ‘She’d better.’ I see no possibility of a worldwide Luddite rebellion that will smash all machinery to bits, so we might as well sit back and see what is happening and what will happen to us in a cybernetic world. Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress … No civilian can escape this environmental blitzkrieg, for there is, quite literally, no place to hide. (264-65)</p></blockquote>
<p>McLuhan’s challenge is to discover how to relate to these technologies without being mere unconscious “servomechanisms,” as he called those who mindlessly embrace inhumanly powerful gadgets. From my point of view, addressing that problem begins with an honest evaluation of what these mechanisms are, who we are, and what it is that we want. What <em><span class="lightEmphasis">art</span></em> wants, as Marcuse articulated it a half century ago, is “images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it” (63). Unfortunately, in the world of the happy servomechanism it is we, artists included, who are dissolved, digested, and totalized.</p>
<p>Wallace Stevens once wrote that poetry was a “destructive force,” and that it can “kill a man.” On the heels of all the great art-isms of the modernist period, whether surrealist, imagist, or fascist, this was a plausible claim. In the present, however, all such pronouncements are risible because they are spoken into a high-tech echo chamber. How happy we are when we post something and twenty-five people press a button claiming to “like” it. For my original essay at <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Lapham’s</span></strong></em>, it has 527 “likes,” and a bonus 206 tweets. (Isn’t that awesome?) It’s enough to make you want to do it again! And we do! But in the end all we hear is the reassuring sound of our own voice.</p>
<p>The enormous fact to be overcome is this: our rulers need spend very little time worrying about what artists are up to. They don’t need strategies for managing their disruptions (like the massive commercial co-opting of the counterculture in the ’60s, back when poetry was still a destructive force, and when poets [Ed Sanders, Robert Lowell] and a novelist [Norman Mailer] could levitate the Pentagon). Literature on the Web comes managed from its beginning. And this for a simple reason: it cannot sufficiently distinguish itself from the vast reaches of mere content. And I have no idea what to do about it except to continue doing what I do and making occasional little roaring noises from the tenebrous depth of my Central Illinois gulag.</p>
<p>One does not need to be a Luddite to say such things. It’s not as if I don’t email, don’t Facebook, don’t Google for quick information (like above when I couldn’t remember if the toad in the garden was in Moore or in Roethke), don’t blog, and have never had a fan site (I was hoodwinked by a wicked publicist!). But I am plenty Nietzschean enough not to want to be human, all too human, and give aid and comfort to my jailer by saying that a prison house is a pleasure dome.</p>
<h3> </h3>
<h3>Works Cited</h3>
<p>Codrescu, Andrei. <span class="booktitle"><em><strong>The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto for Escape</strong></em>.</span> St. Paul: Ruminator Books, 2001. Print.</p>
<p>Keats, John. <em><strong><span class="booktitle">The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats</span></strong></em>. Ed. Horace Elisha Scudder. Boston, 1899. eBook. The Cambridge Poets.</p>
<p>Marcuse, Herbert. <em><strong><span class="booktitle">One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society</span></strong></em>. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print. Routledge Classics.</p>
<p>McLuhan, Marshall. “Playboy Interview: ‘Marshall McLuhan - A Candid Conversation with the High Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media.”<em><strong><span class="booktitle">The Essential McLuhan</span></strong></em>. Ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. New York: Basic Books, 1995. 233-269. Print.</p>
<p>Pascal, Blaise. <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Pensées</span></strong></em>. Trans. Roger Ariew. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing, 2005. Print.</p>
<p>Stevens, Wallace. <em><strong><span class="booktitle">The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens</span></strong></em>. New York: Vintage 1990.</p>
<p>White, Curtis. “The Late Word.” <strong><em>Lapham’s Quarterly</em></strong>: Roundtable. Oct. 2011. Web. January 24, 2012.</p>
<p>Williams, William Carlos. “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems</span></strong></em>. 5th ed. New York: New Directions, 1967. Print.</p>
<p>—. <em><strong><span class="booktitle">Kora in Hell: Improvisations</span></strong></em>. 1920. Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2009.</p>
</div>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/romanticism">romanticism</a>, <a href="/tags/modernism">modernism</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a>, <a href="/tags/classicism">classicism</a>, <a href="/tags/literature">literature</a>, <a href="/tags/publishing">publishing</a>, <a href="/tags/culture">culture</a>, <a href="/tags/community">community</a>, <a href="/tags/high-art">high art</a>, <a href="/tags/web">web</a>, <a href="/tags/canons">canons</a>, <a href="/tags/digital-culture">digital culture</a>, <a href="/tags/technology">technology</a>, <a href="/tags/literary-history">literary history</a>, <a href="/tags/subversion">subversion</a>, <a href="/tags/resistance">resistance</a>, <a href="/tags/media-ecology">media ecology</a></div></div></div>Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:40:01 +0000EBR Administrator2094 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comLooking for Writing after Postmodernismhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/canonized
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<![endif]--><p class="p1"><strong>Review of <em>Mark Z. Danielewski</em>, edited by Joe Bray and Alison Gibbons. University of Manchester Press, 2011. </strong></p><p class="p1">Everyone is tired of talking about postmodernism. This is especially the case with literature, where few writers ever embraced the term enthusiastically. Today calling yourself a postmodernist novelist seems to mean picking a fight with Joyce and Hemingway that everyone else has lost interest in, like an uncle who insists on trying to get everyone worked up about Iran Contra every time the family gets together. </p><p class="p1">Regardless of how we imagine that thing that comes after postmodernism, Mark Danielewski is likely to be one of the central authors around which the definition of a post-postmodernist literature will be built. It is no surprise, therefore, to see a collection of essays like this devoted to his work. After all, <em><strong>House of Leaves</strong></em> can rightfully be considered a contemporary classic, a novel that has quickly established itself as essential reading for those of us who want to understand the place of the novel in the contemporary media ecology. Danielewski’s oeuvre is, however, small. It consists of <strong><em>Leaves</em></strong>, the similarly innovative <strong><em>Only Revolutions</em></strong>, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and the currently out-of-print novella <em><strong>The Fifty Year Sword</strong></em>. In Manchester’s Contemporary American and Canadian Writers series, <em><strong>Mark Z. Danielewski</strong></em> is the only book focused on such an emerging writer. Others include books on Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Louise Erdrich. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is the only book in this series that is a collection of essays instead of a single author monograph. Where many of the books in this series strive to present a unified vision of their authors, <em><strong>Mark Z. Danielewski</strong></em> seems more interested in framing the possible ways that this writer can be understood. This is testament to his liminal position within the literary world today. Most of us feel that whatever comes after postmodernism is embodied in <em><strong>House of Leaves </strong></em>— even if we can’t quite agree about what that is.</p><p class="p1">Given the mission of defining the various ways that Danielewski’s oeuvre can be approached, this collection largely succeeds. The book itself is divided into three sections: the first focuses on <em><strong>House of Leaves</strong></em>, the second on <em><strong>Fifty Year Sword</strong></em>, and the third on <em><strong>Only Revolutions</strong></em>. The distribution of these essays might seem a little surprising. While the fairly obscure <em><strong>Fifty Year Sword</strong></em> only gets a single essay, the editors have assigned an equal five essays to <em><strong>House of Leaves</strong></em> and <em><strong>Only Revolutions</strong></em>. In fact, given that one of the essays in the <em><strong>House of Leaves</strong></em> section is focused on online discussion forums and another studies rather narrowly the theoretical implications of the novel’s first line, readers will find more extensive and concrete analysis of <em><strong>Only Revolutions</strong></em> than of <em><strong>House of Leaves</strong></em>. If nothing else, this balance of coverage works to displace <em><strong>House of Leaves</strong></em> from the center of Danielewski criticism, and to cast his body of work in a fresh light.</p><p class="p1">Collections like this focused on an emerging author are always works of canon formation, pedagogical devices that teach readers how to interpret and situate their subjects. In this regard, some of the design and framing decisions of this collection become especially significant, since they describe how we can begin to assemble a post-postmodernist literature. The introduction provides only passing biographical references - in fact, it begins in media res with the publication of <em><strong>House of Leaves</strong></em> in 2000 - and includes none of the biographical material or interviews that are common in other introductory collections. Although the title of this book begins and ends with the author’s name, the collection itself treats Danielewski less as a person than as the source of three innovative texts. Where biographical facts are discussed - for example, in an interesting chapter on the relationship between <em><strong>House of Leave</strong></em>s and Danielewski’s sister’s album <em><strong>Haunted </strong></em>- those details emerge from interpretational necessity rather than inherent biographical interest. This is appropriate for an author who has consistently played with the issue of the text’s source - most obviously in the multiple framing of <em><strong>House of Leaves</strong></em> - but it is somewhat disconcerting in a book of essays organized around the author’s name. Katherine Hayles provides a summary of the collection’s attitude towards authorship in her commentary on <em><strong>Only Revolutions</strong></em>: “The distributed author function implies that neither the human creator nor his fictional creatures can credibly claim to be the text’s sole author(s)” (172). </p><p class="p1"><span></span>More specifically, these three works are read within a very specific and contemporary media framework. Paul McCormick calls House of Leaves a “cinematic novel” (56), Hayles invokes John Johnson’s concept of “information multiplicity” in reading <em><strong>Only Revolutions</strong></em>, and Mel Evans cites Jessica Pressman’s theory of the “network novel” in investigating the relations between <em><strong>Haunted</strong></em> and <em><strong>House of Leaves</strong></em>. Danielewski’s postmodernist and modernist precursors get relatively little attention. Even though the manipulation of page space to create multiple paths of reading was a common feature of writing by Ron Sukenick, Raymond Federman, and Steve Katz - just to remain in the U.S. - those intertexts get no attention in this collection. The strong desire to define the contemporary novel as some new beast distinct from the postmodernism is on clear display in the way that Danielewski’s precursors are handled in this book. This is perhaps most explicitly stated by Hayles, whose use of Johnson’s theory (rooted in postmodernist standards like <em><strong>Gravity’s Rainbow</strong></em>) seeks to distinguish <em><strong>Only Revolutions</strong></em> from the work that came before: “<em><strong>OR</strong></em> simply assumes the information explosion that Johnson saw as a formative force on contemporary literature. Information has migrated from a foreground figure where it functioned as a causative agent to the background where it forms part of the work’s texture” (161). Hayles’s framing of this novel is distinctly her own, but the desire to see Danielewski as a central figure within a contemporary literature defined by the internet and other media rather than by modernism or postmodernism runs throughout this collection. </p><p class="p1">It is on this point that this collection has the most to tell us about how we envision a literature after postmodernism. The classic criticism on postmodernism in writing tended to imagine a unified spirit of the age. We might think of Ihab Hassan’s lists of modernist and postmodernist qualities in Paracriticism: modernist impersonality vs. postmodernist self-reflexivity, modernist eroticism vs. the “new sexuality” of postmodernism, modernist urbanism vs. the postmodernist global village, and so on. From foundational criticism on postmodernist fiction like McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction and Hutcheon’s Poetics of Postmodernism, though broader cultural studies like Harvey’s Condition of Postmodernity and Jameson’s Postmodernism, there has been an underlying assumption that defining postmodernism means identifying a shared set of beliefs and attitudes that result in specific formal features in these art forms. </p><p class="p1"><span></span>There is still evidence of a search for a contemporary weltanschauung in this collection—perhaps most obviously in Hayles’s idea of a “media explosion” that is part of the backdrop of Danielewski’s work. But what is striking about Mark K. Danielewski as a condition of our post-postmodernist moment is how often analysis of writing today becomes a discussion of the networks in which that writing is located. Of course, evoking the “network novel” can turn the connection into just this kind of old-fashioned unifying cultural theme. But an interest in networks can also do very different work in framing contemporary writing. Let’s recall Matthew Fuller’s gloss on the popular critical concept of the media ecology: “‘Media ecology,’ or more often ‘information ecology,’ is deployed as a euphemism for the allocation of informational roles in organizations and in computer-supported collaborative work” (3). An interest in media ecology has, of course, been an important element of thinking about contemporary literature at least since Tabbi and Wutz’s 1997 collection <em><strong>Writing Matters</strong></em>, but the change in critical attitude is dramatically evident in this collection of essays on Danielewski. Interest in the “allocation of informational roles” prompts us to look not for unifying cultural themes but instead for causal, material links between literary works and their institutional and commercial context. In other words, our contemporary moment seems less inclined to ask “what is writing today?” than “what are the things that people do with writing today?” As I read through this collection I can’t help but wonder if we are entering a time of post-periodization where our old ways of talking about modernism or postmodernism as historical attitudes are replaced by an interest in the multiple roles that literature can play at a given time.</p><p class="p1"><span></span>Given that our ideas about how to periodize literature might be changing, and given that Danielewski is himself a key figure within this change, it should be no surprise that the search for an appropriate literary context for reading these three stories is a subject of some discussion in this collection. Finn Fordham’s reading of <em><strong>House of Leaves</strong></em> contrasts it to two other “ambitious complex” U.S. novels: David Foster Wallace’s <em><strong>Infinite Jest</strong></em> and Don Delillo’s <em><strong>Underworld</strong></em>. Dirk Van Hulle reads <em><strong>Only Revolutions</strong></em> against <em><strong>Finnegans Wake</strong></em>. Conversely, other essays eschew interest in literary context and instead emphasize formal features. Both Brian McHale’s and Hayles’s separate essays on <em><strong>Only Revolutions</strong></em> provide rich and very specific analysis of not only the explicit design of this story, but also its internal rhythms and symmetries - what Hayles describes as “each topographical form articulat[ing] an ideational cluster” (169). In fact, whether because of its relative unfamiliarity to the audience or because it is less explicitly located within an institutional context that gives it specific uses, the readings of <em><strong>Only Revolutions</strong></em> are consistently more engaged with the specifics of the text.</p><p class="p1"><span></span>There are, of course, disadvantages to the variety of style and focus in the essays that make up a collection like this. Quite a few of the essays speak to each other effectively. McHale’s and Hayles’s readings of <em><strong>Only Revolutions</strong></em> do so explicitly. McCormick’s reading of media in <em><strong>House of Leaves</strong></em> resonates effectively as well with Hayles’s emphasis on information multiplicity. Taken together, these three essays provide the most coherent articulation of the place of Danielewski’s writing within the contemporary media ecology. Although somewhat less central to the collection, Mel Evans’s reading of the musical album <em><strong>Haunted</strong></em> addresses issues common with McCormick’s analysis, and speaks indirectly to McHale’s chapter as well. </p><p class="p1"><span></span>Other chapters seem disconnected from this main thread. Bronwen Thomas’s discussion of the Danielewski author forums seems like a natural part of a book on such an internet-aware author, but its concrete analysis of reader behavior seems at odds with the remainder of the book, and it is unfortunate that other essays did not engage with this broader reception context for the novel. Similarly, Alison Gibbons’s very technical analysis of the novel’s opening line, “This is not for you,” is an interesting discussion of the theoretical issues surrounding textural reference and worlds, but the style of the essay is out of keeping with the remainder of the book, and the questions raised by a novel that is “an entrance into a place we are being forbidden to enter” (30) never translate to concrete observations about the novel itself. The tendency of the essays to spin off into questions independent of Danielewski’s writing is evident even in McHale’s engaging chapter, which is as much about Rachael Blau DuPlessis’s definition of poetry as “segmentivity” as it is about <em><strong>Only Revolutions</strong></em> or Danielewski’s oeuvre. </p><p class="p1"><span></span>In the end, <em><strong>Mark Z. Danielewski</strong></em> embodies Danielewski’s own problematic place within contemporary literary culture, and in turn suggests why defining a post-postmodernist literature has been difficult. Even though this collection implicitly argues that here is an author who deserves sustained attention to a whole body of work, the essays themselves are frequently the most engaging when they are allowed to illuminate the distinct concerns of these individual critics. Those concerns are part of what many of us think of as the current media ecology — the disposition of various literary roles and functions within culture today. Whether those roles eventually cohere into something that looks like romanticism or modernism, or whether it is a condition of our transitional moment that literature should have many and various uses, remains to be seen. </p><p class="p2"><strong>Works Cited</strong></p><p class="p2"><span>Fuller, Matthew. <em><strong>Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture</strong></em>. Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2005.</span></p><p class="p2"><span>Harvey, David. <em><strong>The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change</strong></em>. London: Blackwell, 1989.</span></p><p class="p2"><span>Hassan, Ihab. <em><strong>Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations on the Times</strong></em>. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975.</span></p><p class="p2"><span>Hutcheon, Linda. <em><strong>A Poetics of Postmoderrnism: History, Theory, Fiction</strong></em>. New York: Methuen, 1988.</span></p><p class="p1">Jameson, Fredric. <em><strong>Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism</strong></em>. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.</p><p class="p1">McHale, Brian. <em><strong>Postmodernist Fiction</strong></em>. New York: Metheun, 1987.</p><p class="p1">Tabbi, Joseph and Michael Wutz. <em><strong>Reading Matters: Narratives in the New Media Ecology</strong></em>. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. </p><pre> </pre></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/american-literature">american literature</a>, <a href="/tags/literary-history">literary history</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern-fiction">postmodern fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a>, <a href="/tags/experimental-fiction">experimental fiction</a>, <a href="/tags/networked-fiction">networked fiction</a></div></div></div>Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:20:54 +0000Ryan Brooks2091 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comThe End of Exemptions for Beautyhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/ramshackle
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">William Smith Wilson</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2003-01-26</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The continental United States has a history with beauty and with exemptions from foreign wars. A president of the United States, Franklin Pierce, noted the exemptions in his inaugural address of March 4, 1853: “Of the complicated European systems of national polity we have heretofore been independent. From their wars, their tumults, and anxieties we have been, happily, almost entirely exempt. Whilst these are confined to the nations which gave them existence, and within their legitimate jurisdiction, they can not affect us except as they appear to our sympathies in the cause of human freedom and universal advancement.”</p>
<p>A decade later an English novelist, Anthony Trollope, demurred because exemptions had been forfeited by waging the War Between the States. He noted, “The Americans had fondly thought that they were to be exempt from the curse of war - at any rate from the bitterness of the curse. But the days for such exemptions have not come as yet.”</p>
<p>After the Civil War, although the Nation was still bullying, battling, and buying its way westward, the country seemed sufficiently exempt from European wars. That such exemptions, immunities, and impunities were unrealistic is conveyed by a whimsical statement attributed to Otto von Bismarck: “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.”</p>
<p>The attack on the World Trade Center made the end of exemptions observable. As early as September 12, Justin Raimondo posted remarks, “Terror at Home: the price of hegemony”: “The World Trade Center - monument towering over downtown Manhattan like twin silver phalli pointed at heaven - is but a pile of smoldering rubble. Crashing down along with this symbol of capitalism, modernity, and civilization is the overweening hubris of a government - and a people - which thought themselves immune. It is the doctrine of ‘American exceptionalism,’ the theory that the US - blessed by Providence and released from the travails faced by other nations - is immune, exempt not only from the rules that govern and limit the powers of other nations, but also from history itself…” His interpretation of the WTC as “this symbol of capitalism, modernity, and civilization” is too splashy and general. For the meaning of buildings to be more than a designated concept like “capitalism,” Raimondo must connect the “symbol” with the style of the buildings, the specifiable meanings of those specific buildings.</p>
<p>Slavoj Zizek announced that “…one thing is sure: the US, which, till now, perceived itself as an island exempted from this kind of violence, witnessing this kind of thing only from the safe distance of the TV screen, is now directly involved” (“Welcome to the Desert of the Real”). Susan Sontag, in an interview for <span class="booktitle">Salon</span> magazine with David Talbot, October 2001, mentions the popular notion of exemption: “There’s an American exceptionalism; we’re supposed to be exempt from the calamities and terrors and anxieties that beset other countries.” Responses to her statements, in <span class="booktitle">Salon</span> and in <span class="booktitle">The New Yorker</span>, show that questioning a special providence is judged an unpatriotic and irreligious subversion.</p>
<p>Within institutional religions, a few Protestant ministers have said that the exemptions granted to this most favored nation by Divine Grace have been forfeited by bad conduct. The suggestion is that a providential God who once granted exemptions has retracted them as punishment for sin. However in religions of humility, the purposes of God are unknown except insofar as they have been revealed. Only a prophet can bring such accusations, which otherwise are the work of pride. In this discussion, words for “prophet” in many languages might be translated, “a person of heroic humility,” or as “a significantly negated person.” Many persons have been reluctant to become prophets because of the negations, but have submitted to the will of God. The name of Islam is explained as “submission,” yet could be rendered “humility,” as in the humble submission in which a soul is safe within the governance of an omnipotent and loving Allah.</p>
<p>One discovery that can be made within religious adventures is that a people, a nation, a saint, or a prophet chosen by God or Allah are not exempted from suffering, and may even qualify for their tasks through their suffering. Handicaps such as blindness and stuttering can mark a person as especially receptive to the divine. Thus the relations between power and humility are misrepresented in the <span class="booktitle">New York Times</span> when it describes a “spiritual leader” who is a “most charismatic rival” to Arafat: “Crippled from a childhood injury, he is frail, uses a wheelchair and speaks in a high squeaky voice. But his uncompromising denunciations of Israel from his spartan headquarters in Gaza thrill many and inspire suicide bombers” (June 14, 2002). The truth is that even humiliations like “a high squeaky voice” authenticate charismatic leaders so that they do “thrill” and “inspire.” The adjective “Spartan” suggests the self-negation that complements the other negations.</p>
<p>The weaker the person in some worldly power, as though a power or pleasure has been sacrificed, the more heroic the piety. A person who is sightless in this world may have insight into a superior world. The rule is that for a person to qualify as a spiritual mediator, and for a spiritual act to have efficacy, self must be negated or self-negated. Prophets, saints, and martyrs do not receive exemptions from suffering, although they may be redeemed through their suffering.</p>
<p>The World Trade Center stood amid exemptions, but not comfortably. Undertones of anxiety are experienced by a character in an autobiographical novel, <span class="booktitle">How He Saved Her</span>, by Ellen Schwamm. In this novel, a woman leading a privileged life, amid many exemptions, dines with her family at the WTC, in a restaurant named Windows on the World: “The room was walled in glass on three sides. It appeared to hang, thrillingly unconcerned, in space. Planes went by, their lights winking. A city etched in colored light fanned out at their feet. Stars were scattered like buckshot across the sky around this somehow dreary room.” During the evening she meets, and falls in love with, a man who seems to grant no exemptions based on wealth or worldly power. She goes from the “thrillingly unconcerned” top of the WTC to the thrilling concerns of an unexempted life in which she will struggle toward authenticities.</p>
<p>Falling in love while dining at Windows on the World opens systems that seemed to have closed. One of the conflicts in these events is between systems that would close down over people, and systems that open possibilities. Was the WTC a closed system or an open system? Its coherence and self-consistency suggest a closed system, but the people laboring at food services, and the people working at finance, went into and out of many systems. They can be seen to have held the systems open, restoring, maintaining, and even increasing possibilities. According to obituaries which have been written as vivaciously as possible, people who worked in the WTC did not separate the beauty of their experiences from the beauty of the buildings as architectural objects.</p>
<p>The question of the beauty of the WTC survives. Since I rarely used the buildings except as a platform from which to view a spectacle, I did not experience the beauty of open constructive processes in which workers participated. Like many others in Manhattan, I now think the buildings to have been beautiful in a way that I did not see earlier. Then I saw, but did not feel, while now I feel, but can no longer see. I would like to change my testimony.</p>
<p>My experiences of beauty have yielded impressions of what beauty is for me - a sense of the actively beautiful as that with which I desire to conceive something. I see no reason to limit an inspiration to conceive to the physical or to the mental. If with the beautiful I find myself desiring to conceive something, and if I grant exemptions, and no longer put up resistance, I feel an increase in the available energy. Then what are some of the possible relations among beauty, energy, and exemptions? We see in ordinary events that the beautiful person, place or “thing” is more likely to be granted exemptions than the plain or the ugly. In an economics of energy, such exemptions save energy that isn’t spent overcoming resistances. Although beauty can never be quantified, an observer could calculate the degree to which a closed system will open for a beautiful person in ordinary social events. Such exemptions for beauty reach the theme of possibility, because the beautiful opens possibilities in a system.</p>
<p>In the case of the WTC, the attack was aimed by one-system people against multi-system people. The use of one system, especially one that would close over itself in absolute consistency, is dangerous, because closed systems run out of energy. An apparent waste of energy among resentful people is visible in Manhattan, where a Muslim mosque has been built by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Years ago I toured it with its articulate architect, the late Michael McCarthy, the painter and sculptor John Willenbecher, and an Imam who followed our every discalced step, listening with piercing attention. Earlier McCarthy explained that the minaret in Manhattan is a structure that cannot be used by a muezzin to call people to prayer, because loud announcements are illegal. Some Islamic scholars, and McCarthy, judged a minaret to be a structure with no function, hence no meaning. However: “Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmed Al-Jaber Al-Sabah the Amir of the state of Kuwait, …during his visit to New York in September 1988 pledged to donate whatever amount is necessary to complete the construction of the minaret.” As of today, that silent minaret calls the faithful to resent their position under secular power, and to await the dawn of theocracy, when its use might become possible. A minaret waiting beside a mosque on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is important because the WTC has been compared with Islamic buildings in Mecca, even by its architect, Minoru Yamasaki. The style of the WTC is described by Laurie Kerr, whose essay in <span class="lightEmphasis">Slate</span> magazine is a source of my grateful wonder. Yamasaki designed the King Fahd Dharan Air Terminal in Saudi Arabia. His design “…had a rectilinear, modular plan with pointed arches, interweaving tracery of prefabricated concrete, and even a minaret of a flight tower. In other words, it was an impressive melding of modern technology and traditional Islamic form.”</p>
<p>The next year Yamasaki won the commission for the WTC: “Yamasaki described its plaza as ‘a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area’.” “Yamasaki’s courtyard mimicked Mecca’s assemblage of holy sites–the Qaaba…and the holy spring–by including several sculptural features, including a fountain, and he anchored the composition in a radial circular pattern, similar to Mecca’s. At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches–derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam…” Kerr concludes with precision and lucidity: “To bin Laden, the World Trade Center was probably not only an international landmark but a false idol.”</p>
<p>To compare the WTC with Mecca blurs the difference between the profane and sacred. The WTC could never be more than a demonic parody of Mecca, which is a place in which Allah acts from within eternity on the temporal, and from within infinity on the finite. However, on the Internet, someone writes that a person as insightful as bin Laden “…would have instead felt proud that Islamic architecture and Islamic metaphors figured so prominently in the biggest symbol of Western capitalism.” (Cairolive 01/03/02). This statement underestimates the offense to a religion in which spiritual pollutions are as vile as sins or moral faults. A secular appropriation of Islamic motifs is a misappropriation that pollutes the faith, and is not taken for a compliment. Any such secular judgments are of absolutely no interest within the faith, if only because few Euro-American judgments are of any interest. In Saudi Arabia, an airport with Islamic motifs can glorify Allah, so that a picture of that airport on paper-money is sufficiently pious. But secular buildings in Manhattan with derivative Islamic motifs can but distract from the architecture of faith.</p>
<p>One theme in the attack in September 2001 is punishment for our methods of thinking as those blithely pollute Islam. By December 2002, speculation on future attacks should look at other pollutions of Islam, and then follow implications toward the source of the pollution. Because Buddhist sculpture defiled Afghanistan and offended a rival faith, it has been annihilated by purifiers. So speculation should ask: Are any non-Islamic religious sites insulting to Islam? Which secular themes violate the truth of Islam? What other impurities can be exorcised? A favorite on my list is the International Space Station, because it anguishes the sky above Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. These themes will be clarified the next time a pious Muslim, or an Arabian-American, applies to become an astronaut.</p>
<p>The design of the Saudi Arabian airport and of the WTC recall an era in which a theme, often implicit in American art, became explicit and sufficient: possibility. In its openness to change, possibility differs in degrees from probability, which is a condition of fewer options. If degrees of probability continue to increase, they may reach necessity, when a system closes over itself, consistent as a sphere. A peculiar hope, characteristic of much significant visual art in the United States through the 1960s and 1970s, has been to act without reducing possibilities to probabilities, and without exhausting the probabilities into necessities.</p>
<p>The hope of secular optimism is to keep situations as full of possibility at the conclusion of a series of events as at the beginning. The art and the architecture that convey images and ideas of secular possibilities after the Enlightenment are often called “Minimal,” a dead-end notion. In a compromise, I call the style Minimal-Operational or Operational-Minimal, trying to point toward the use of explicit abstract operations that remain visible in the specifiable operations used on materials. Operations can be separated into two kinds at least, abstract operations and concrete operations. Abstract operations work with abstract objects. For example, mathematical operations are abstract, reversible, and ever possible. An abstract operation is not physical, so it can be applied again and again without being diminished or depleted. Abstract operations are applied in specifications and measurements when constructing concrete objects.</p>
<p>Concrete operations apply abstract operations in the construction of concrete objects. While abstract operations are intellectually reversible, concrete operations are irreversible when used in the construction of buildings, yet can still feel “operational.” With the WTC, abstract operations could be inferred from the concrete actions that followed explicit abstract operations. In Operational-Minimal art and architecture, irreversible concrete operations illustrate the reversible abstract operations that have been applied.</p>
<p>A living organic structure follows a temporal order with three parts: 1) possibility in the beginning; 2) probabilities, as those possibilities diminish in the middle of life; and 3) necessities which shape the end, after probabilities have been exhausted. The parts of a living organism are conceived of as interdependent within a system, enjoying flexible interrelations within a process that is closed by the necessity of dying. While the acorn is destined to become an oak tree, as an organism the tree is destined both to produce seeds and later to die. In Islamic art, organic objects are rarely, if at all, represented in the process of birth, life, and death. Rather than the beginning, middle, and end of an organism, flowers are shown in a moment of fullness that bodies forth the timeless ideal of the flower. Organisms are represented in the moment in which their contract with eternity has been fulfilled.</p>
<p>The ideal of such works of art is to show the temporal as it touches the eternal, rather than as it bodies forth “organic form.” In contrast, through much of the 19th and 20th centuries in Euro-America, works of visual art have been seen as “organic” forms. In art as organic form, the hope has been that organic art will exhibit the “livingness” of an organism, yet will not die like an organism. More recently, as visual arts criticized false illusions in the art of organic forms, they both negated the idea of necessary interrelations among parts, and set in motion ideas and images of continuous possibility. However the secular theme of possibility in secular operational art differs radically from the themes of continuous possibility in religious art. In Islamic art, possibility is entirely within the will of Allah. The two approaches to possibility, in this finite world and in the Infinity of Paradise, need not have interfered with each other, but they collided when the WTC was built with Islamic motifs. Such motifs shaped to express otherworldly possibilities were misused as decorative details within a stunning expression of worldly possibilities.</p>
<p>A stark contrast can demonstrate a different understanding of the qualities of an open and of a closed system. Setting aside Islam for a moment to look at Euro-American history in the 1960s, systems that would have closed down over open systems were pried open. This opening of possibilities was occurring in religions, politics, and the arts. Circumstances that we had been told were necessary and inevitable were changed. Start with Councils in the Vatican in which the Catholic Church rethought its identity in fresh images. Look at the situations in Paris, 1968. Around the world, more people began to struggle for and to receive more justice than had ever been possible in the history of civilizations. More people had more constructive possibilities than had ever been available. American secular art and architecture may not have had direct effects, yet they did participate in the mood of the period. What I call Operational-Minimal art, and technological architecture like the WTC, conveyed feelings and ideas of constructive possibility by bodying forth explicit abstract operations. In my experience, that art and architecture operated against ideologies that would have closed down over the minds of people, rendering innocent possibilities impossible.</p>
<p>By the 1960s and 1970s, the problem for some architects has long been how to get a commercial building to express values inherent in technological architecture. Part of the solution was to let materials qua materials remain visible on the surface. The style would not subordinate its materials and methods of building to an architectural illusion. Such materiality of the materials would in effect scratch the surface of the aesthetic experience. And those materials would be hard-edged and in sharp-focus by explicitly manifesting abstract operations. Concrete poured in straight lines, and simple modules in a potentially infinite series, would suffice. Decorative motifs like Saudi Arabian arches both compromised the operational architecture and misused Islam.</p>
<p>The WTC belongs with operational, technological architecture, yet it was less aloof than most. As a whole spacious complex, it hailed a passerby to choose a “desire-line,” that is, to choose a path across an open plaza, guided by whims and responsibilities. Even a person arriving for daily work could respond to one of many options, improvising, while answering a summons toward work intended to increase possibilities. As people say, the buildings made a statement. The statement I accepted was a statement on the theme of worldly possibilities within rational but inspired commercial activities. The buildings stood as models for actions which did not subside into exhausted necessities, but which maintained and increased the possibilities for further constructive actions. Such possibilities imply that the closed can be opened, and that the future can become more than falling passively into place.</p>
<p>I am using the word “possibility” in ways bound to distress some readers. A word is not a concept already out there, humming with meanings. The word gathers meanings when and how it is used to point with toward something, to refer to an abstract object or a concrete object. And on this theme of reference, nothing in itself refers to anything else. The meaning of anything as a reference is constructed when the “thing” is used to refer. The arches at the WTC could be used to refer to Islamic arches by those who know the history of arches; or they could be enjoyed as a flourish, and not used to refer to anything other than generic arches. Although the arches were not necessarily used as a sign of anything by many people, surely they were recognized by students of city-planning. Mohammed Atta, writing a dissertation on a city-scape, could have taught himself to be offended by the theft of traditional Islamic motifs.</p>
<p>Architecture can try to show us how to live, with its use of materials, structures and functions as a model for the way we should live now. The hope is that a building of technological architecture measures up to trustworthy people who strive to measure up to the trustworthy building. At the WTC, technological architecture took account of human feelings, but called people from their congested subjectivity toward an objectivity visible in the abstract geometry. The experience is familiar, but I want it to be seen as somewhat strange: the people and the place were each answerable to the other, a process of reciprocal critiques and reciprocal modifications. If the people said to the buildings, Function efficiently and vivaciously, the buildings could ask the same of the people.</p>
<p>How could the WTC embody possibility any more than other buildings? Note that a copy of a skyscraper is not necessary, nor even very probable. Yet the Twin Towers of the WTC suggested that after finishing one tower, the builders went back to the plans in order to build a second tower. If two buildings are built largely from one plan, then that plan is perceived as abstract, its possibilities undiminished by use, in contrast with the unique use of one set of plans on one specific building.</p>
<p>The identicalness of the two buildings did not limit possibilities, because the buildings were not flush with each other, but each set back in relation to the other. Walking from one building to the other on the plaza, a person was confronted by the symmetries of the buildings in asymmetrical positions. A straight line was not possible from door to door, so that anyone walking needed to improvise a turn between the one and the other. A turn, even within a routine such as arriving for work, enables a person to see people, places, or things from more than one viewpoint, and then to continue to invent a path into a new situation. Permission was granted to choose your path, and later to change it. The buildings encouraged the freedom to set oneself in motion on a path of one’s responsible desires. Losing my way so often, I frequently invented new paths toward Innovation Luggage.</p>
<p>This specific architecture expressed possibility more intensely and persuasively than other buildings in at least three ways: 1) the twoness, as in the name, Twin Towers; 2) the non-identical positions of almost identical towers; 3) the unnecessary but possible height. The buildings were tall in order to express hopes emerging from technology and world trade, rather than hope for spiritual heightening. Commercial motives, like the fame of the tallest buildings attracting tenants into expensive offices, explain nothing. The many critical statements that the buildings symbolized capitalism overlook the need for a building to produce a revelation from within its structures and functions. Such a revelation is not a meaning imposed on the exterior of buildings, it is the advent of a concept within the sensory experience. Let the meaning of a building as a symbol emerge from its specific materials, colors, and shapes, and from the style of life toward which the building summons people. If the architects get the right architectural combination of structures and functions, then meaning and symbolism can almost take care of themselves.</p>
<p>A problem with my celebration of possibility qua possibility is naïve oversimplification, an obliviousness to the existence of evil. Yes, technology increases possibilities, and yes, it can be used to open and reopen systems that would close down over us. But nothing within technology as such can describe differences between good and bad, or constructive and destructive. So while possibility as a theme can seem entirely secular, pertaining only to immanences, even possibilities must be judged in relation to human purposes as good, or true, or beautiful. Such judgments use concepts from outside the world, criteria not derived from events, yet inseparable from experience. These concepts are not immanent, but transcendental, and in my experience, some version of them is inescapable. Yet these are precisely the concepts that secular philosophy either denies if it opposes them, or has difficulty justifying if it accepts them. Enlightened secularism is at a disadvantage in its relations with Islam, because Islam has no hesitation in justifying judgments of transcendent values like goodness, truth, and beauty, securely founded on the will of Allah.</p>
<p>Technology and rationality can support each other, but rationality gets into trouble. As soon as rationality admits that it uses and needs concepts that transcend experience of the world, concepts like true and false, then such abstract concepts can be used as models for the existence of unworldly abstract entities like angels and devils. Transcendentals tend to overlap, that is, to be predicable of each other, the way the good is also the beautiful. Thus the good can be bodied forth as an angel, mixing abstract transcendental concepts with abstract transcendental entities. Because transcendental philosophic concepts overlap, these two concepts, rationality and transcendence, must overlap. Thus we lose criteria for empirical reality the moment we enter rationalist thinking, because rational thought uses some transcendentals, and cannot prevent other transcendental concepts from mixing with transcendental entities.</p>
<p>Euro-American rational and secular thought cannot restrain any of the Islams, but some of the Islams can annihilate the meanings of Euro-American science and technology. Religious systems can use technology for their purposes without responding to any ethics or aesthetics of technology. At their edges religions can even defy criteria of efficiency, reliability, and economy, as in building useless minarets. Fundamentalist preachers in several faiths use television or cassette-tapes to reach semi-literate people, but they overwhelm the technology, with its inherent values, with imposed transcendental values. Empiricism must lament that while modern technology has arisen with open covenants openly arrived at between technology and other systems, technology itself can never impose its values or offer itself as the only system. Technology cannot negate religion, but religion can subsume and negate technology.</p>
<p>Technology cannot but emphasize possibilities, constructing opportunities for novel actions. But such actions can entail self-assertions that amount to an idolatry of the self, a version of polytheism. The contrary to such possibility is the necessity that must be yielded to because it is the will of Allah. Because everything belongs to Allah, and is a gift, the self is nothing in itself. An apparent life and an apparent self only become a real life and a real self after death, which therefore is not negative but positive, and is not an end, but a beginning. That posthumous beginning is the beginning of possibilities on another plane of existence, that is, in Paradise, a realm of continuous possibilities that never subside into probability or necessity.</p>
<p>The theme of negations eventually reaches the theme of exemptions. What are the relations between negations and exemptions? In this historical situation, American exemptions and self-exemptions inspire other people to negate them. In pragmatic terms, the attack on the World Trade Center is inefficient and non-productive, since the attack does not produce food, clothing, or shelter for a single person. But for the men in the attacks, an air-attack on an impregnable city in the United States is the external negation of the negations of Islam, especially its lost exemptions. Those men did not take their revenge on the specific individuals working in the WTC, but on a society that acts on behalf of Becoming at the expense of Being, ignoring Allah, the Ground of Being. For people in a pragmatic mood, a question to ponder is, What positive is constructed by a negation? Can a practical people, embracing technology, understand the religious uses of negation? Although we are familiar with dedicated technologists who become self-forgetful and self-sacrificing when inspired to work, their selflessness or self-emptying is not the kind of negation that facilitates mediation between Becoming and Being, between finite and Infinite, or between temporal and Eternal. Technology cannot use religions and spiritual negations to solve technological problems, but religions can use technologies even while negating their inherent values.</p>
<p>To qualify to perform in that event of 9/11, the actors qualified themselves by their internal negation, that is, by self-negations of their personalities. In their actions until September 10th, the men appeared to negate their Muslim identities with casual American deportment. Why should Americans be suspicious of foreign men who are learning to fly, but not to take off or to land airplanes? After all, what could resentful dispossessed aliens do to the exempted people of an exempted nation? Then, on September 11th, they first negated the American in themselves, and then negated themselves, by a complete annihilation that was difficult to comprehend because of unfamiliarity with concepts that are not empirical or pragmatic. Revealingly, although a large majority of the population of the United States claims faith in transcendental religions, the attack on the World Trade Center was not perceived and judged as a religious act, the only terms in which it is intelligible.</p>
<p>The citizens of the Islamic world matter to themselves in ways that do not matter to the U.S. government. A question arises: Who comprehends the lost power, glory, privilege, and exemption of those people? Who can respect and describe their different methods of thinking? The answer is that the persons qualified to explain fundamentalist Islam to our government are sincere fundamentalist Christians. Radical Christians not only share incomprehension by secular authorities, they share resentments, their awareness of angels, their faith in a book as the revealed word of God, and their modes of transcendental illuminations. Those Christians in the United States who would annihilate their enemies are the experts who could explain Islam at its extremes.</p>
<p>When a something that participates in a positive is opposed by a something that participates in a negative, the conflict is uneven, and the opponents are misaligned. The men who seized the planes used technological power to negate the military-political powers that in their experience negated them. But more positively, and from their point of view constructively, they negated themselves in order to offer themselves unconditionally to a Power of Powers. The difference between the American and the Islamic claims to exemptions is the difference between those Americans who do not go through negation or self-negation to get to the positive, and those Muslims who understand this universal truth: only negations and self-negations qualify persons for increases in spiritual power and spiritual exemptions. Even giving alms to the poor is a self-denial that can generate a positive spiritual experience. In the background is the understanding that the greatest selflessness is love. Such love entails an ultimate and absolutely selfless self-negation because the lover must prefer the good of the beloved to the good of the lover. The love of Allah is manifest in that Allah knows, better than any person can, the good for that person. Ideally, love is reciprocated, so that the two are both lover and beloved, and as lover, each prefers the good of the beloved to the lover’s good. At least I hear that it is so in Paradise.</p>
<p>I offer as a curiosity of the religious imagination that the one concept in which radically different theologies participate is the concept of nothing. However variously negation is understood, every religion seems to have its own self-sacrifice and self-emptying, associated with kenosis. A person who achieves the blankness of the emptied self can reach toward new possibilities in faith, hope, and love. Thus, for the faithful, true experience for the soul begins <span class="foreignWord">ex nihilo</span>, spiritual possibilities opening only after a person has annihilated self, or parts of self. Many people who feel negated by America respond with grievances, resentments, and loathings, and a few of them will negate themselves in the faith that their self-annihilation will carry their souls into Paradise. Nothing is where comprehension of the men who flew themselves toward their deaths must begin.</p>
<p>The interpretation and judgment of “suicides” brings back the opposition between two theories of authentic life. At an extreme of emancipation, some people are trying to experience authentic life as satisfaction of their most individual needs and desires, physical, and psychical. Call that authenticity of immanences, and let Jean Genet represent it. Other people are trying to experience authentic life within their monotheistic faith, call that authenticity of transcendentals, let Jeanne d’Arc represent it. Both Jeanne d’Arc and Jean Genet did violence to ordinary life on behalf of absolutes. Each subverted orthodoxies, whether of society or of religion, as each pursued a goal of absolute purity, obedience of the self or obedience of God. Jeanne obeyed the laws of God as revealed from outside her, and Jean obeyed the laws of his own nature as revealed within him. She subscribed to a faith in authentication by God, while he believed in an autonomous self-authentication. Each had to violate the laws of society and government to demonstrate that they were not conforming to ordinary conventions or laws. Such absolutist purity of Saint Joan and of “Saint” Genet was their solution to problems of authentic life. But if you ask me, I think that a person can and should participate in both extremes, transcendence and immanence, while holding each plane answerable to the other in order to avoid the destructive violence of absolutist authenticity.</p>
<p>I offer an adjustment of perspectives to show those men piloting those airplanes dying to their modern selves as the only authenticating act open to them. Throughout these events, when the physical plane intersects with the spiritual plane, adjustments of vision are necessary to see apparent events as they become real within a providential plan of Allah. Death is not death: “Think not of those who are slain in Allah’s way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord.” Some people practicing a faith have said, “I believe it because it is impossible,” and some have called for greater absurdities in order to challenge reason with faith. In such contexts, faith negates reason. Such faith so revises perceptions that their dying is not suicide, it is a spiritual self-emptying, visible if we see that the men died with a purpose beyond dying. Comprehension of the attacks should understand that to act like a suicide-pilot, one must hold faith like a suicide-pilot.</p>
<p>The spiritual use of emptiness and of self-negation combines with my theme, that possibilities diminish into worldly probabilities, and probabilities increase until they become necessities, but that self-negation can reopen possibilities. These concepts turn and twist, difficult to control, but their resilience is their strength. Suppose we ask, What are the relations between emptiness and possibility? An American Archbishop has publicly confessed after he has been cornered by necessity and has lost his freedom of movement. He lists his feelings as “…remorse, contrition, shame, and emptiness” (New York Times 06/01/22). Of course when he lists “emptiness” he inserts a sleepy word that might reawaken. Yes, he feels the futility of a career that has come to nothing, or worse, almost nothing, so he suffers emptiness. But as a religious sophisticate, he has learned about redemptive suffering, and about how self-negation can restore possibilities. His emptiness entitles the Archbishop to hope for his future, because in emptiness begins possibility.</p>
<p>The narrative of the life of Mohammed is told with anecdotes that suggest the resistance and humiliation he suffered in this world, and his self-negation in the sense of his humility in relation to Allah. He mentions his ignorance about his own death as an example of his limited knowledge. Within the biographical anecdotes Mohammed incarnated humility, manifest in his unknowing. Knowing that he did not know, he did not overreach by presuming to know the mind and will of Allah. He knew that he needed revealed knowledge, a gift from a transcendental plane that strengthened his humility, not his pride. These thoughts are so common to religions that T. S. Eliot can focus the judgment into a fixed point: “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” Let endless be understood as a continuum of possibilities available through humility.</p>
<p>“Submission” is a governing Islamic concept that overlaps and suffuses humility. Miracles of faith are miracles of submission to the faith. Associating Mohammed with submission, his self-denials qualify Mohammed to mediate between two realms, transmitting, and receiving without encountering resistances. Prophets and martyrs, persons of heroic sanctity who overcome their resistance to the will of God or Allah, achieve the sublime. I am going to call them mystics.</p>
<p>My statement, which shocks even me, is that at least four of those men must be credited with sincere faith, and in these speculations must be called mystics. The hypothesis of mysticism is more adequate to events than “terrorists.” Of course some of these “martyrs” visited a club where women strip and perform mock-sexual acts, where some men drank alcohol and otherwise violated laws and customs of their religion, showing themselves in a parody of Americans that made them invisible to Americans. Clearly these men, at least the few certain to have known the plans, did not conform to orthodox Muslim conduct.</p>
<p>By September, the men to pilot the planes were approaching the mystical marriage of their souls in Paradise. Because they were about to be married, an evening of entertainment before their weddings looks like a grotesque American bachelor party. A bachelor party offers the groom a last indulgent assertion of lone selfhood, immediately before the loss of autonomy within marriage. A reference to such a coarse event is a coarse reference, but either men about to die were entertaining themselves to kill time, or they were participating in a coherent pattern in which meretricious fullness of sensory experience precedes ritual and mythic emptying.</p>
<p>Only some exaggeration will get near the truth here. These “mystics” were extricating themselves from their unjust and humiliating marriage to existence. They divorced themselves from the secular world in preparation for an equitable marriage in Paradise. The very method of the marriage would make them worthy of the love they would receive. They will not be understood until they are perceived as bridegrooms flying themselves into their weddings.</p>
<p>The men suffered pollutions at their lowest point, descending before ascending. After some risky self-pollutions, as they approached the end of time for them, they were to remove all body hair in a ritual of cleaning, and were to follow rituals of self-purification on the morning of their flights. In this paragraph, a ritual is an act that enables a soul to participate in a transcendental continuum (the parallel in a religion of immanences in the Cosmos is a ritual that enables a soul to participate in a continuum of immanences). Accordingly, a transcendental myth is a story about the participation of a soul in a transcendental continuum (God; Allah). I am looking for the plot of a myth the men were enacting: first their meretricious fullness of self amid discontinuities, then their emptying of self in order to qualify to enter the Continuum of Continuums. In a ritual intended to construct a small continuum of its own, the men were instructed to pray continuously, in an uninterrupted series, calling on an absolute negative, “no god,” to support their positive faith: “There is no God but Allah.”</p>
<p>The continuous series of identical prayers, where the repetition does not diminish the power, has many analogies in these events. Allow that a non-Muslim man who in this world marries one woman begins a process that will go through possibility into probability and then into necessity, a quasi-organic dramatic structure with a beginning, middle, and end. Now picture experiences in Paradise with seventy-two women, sometimes called “virgins.” On a theme of possibility, one virgin in a series bodies forth possibility in a way that a wife does not. Setting aside the women, look at the number seventy two. In October, 680, Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet, led seventy-one of his family and followers to certain death in battle. A series of seventy two entities, whether white raisins, virgins, or martyrs, does not accumulate probabilities until they add up to necessities. Each encounter with each of seventy two entities is as full of virginal possibilities as the first.</p>
<p>The elements that succeed each other do not differ significantly from each other. They are arranged in a series that is not organic, but seriatim. Wary questions have been asked about male tumescence and the seriatim virgins, and have been answered by a Sheik in New Jersey who has promised continuous erections in Paradise (that Sheik is blind, hence is qualified to see beyond this world, like Tiresias, Oedipus, and John Milton). Moreover, in some folk theology, upon the Day of Judgment the soul of a “martyr” receives a gift, a kind of dowry, the right to bring seventy two souls into Paradise. So the families of these men who have died in order to enter Paradise are entitled to expect to be welcomed there. Such is the mystical power of martyrs.</p>
<p>In a series of perhaps seventy two entities, each is no more and no less possible than the one before it. Non-cumulative series should be held next to the stories of <span class="booktitle">The Thousand and One Nights</span>. A thousand episodes are not structured like chapters of a novel in which actions emerge “organically” from prior actions. An organic aesthetic structure is like a snake with its tail in its mouth, with mutual implications between the beginning and the end. In contrast, each of Scheherazade’s stories pauses when the narrative blooms with possibilities. With her series, Scheherazade uses possibility to free her from the probability that the conclusion of a story will bring the necessity of death.</p>
<p>How do these series, outside the rhythms of human organic time, relate to the World Trade Center? The very word “series” should evoke the context of the 1960s and 1970s, when organicism was dissolved by the use of mechanical or mathematical series. In architecture, the repetition of units in the WTC enacted the same non-cumulative possibility, the force of sustained possibilities without a dramatic climax. Perhaps neither Osama bin Laden nor anyone in Islam knew or cared about Operational-Minimal styles expressing secular possibilities. But we should be able to see that Islamic series are grounded in a transcendental continuum, and would be degraded if mixed with secular series in temporal experiences. While flowers in Dutch paintings bud, bloom, wither, and die, Islamic flowers hold their bloom outside the passage of time. In Islamic art, a temporal sequence is not visible because a series of flowers is arranged in an abstract pattern in which they preserve their fullness at a steady level.</p>
<p>Within the art, visible in the calligraphy, movement along an arabesque differs from movement along a straight line or even a regular curve. If one walks a straight line into a landscape, following it will bring one to the goal at the end of the line. However if one walks on an arabesque path, the gradual turns do not lead straight ahead or in a direct reversal, but offer a person a series of perspectives that demonstrate that no one point of view is sufficient. Such a series, grounded in a continuum, does not reduce possibility toward inevitability. Some people following arabesques of thought see no reason to be persuaded by verified facts, hence decline to believe a report that concludes without taking into account the will of Allah. Misunderstandings of Arabic responses to the attack need to be corrected: a moderate Muslim need not support bin Laden or murder in order to understand that the event conformed to the will of Allah, otherwise it would not have occurred.</p>
<p>If Islamic art is judged to be decorative, one reason is that forms do not reach a climax and then subside. Just as pictures of flowers do not follow the fate of a seed that grows into a tree which is doomed to die, the renunciation of organic processes is visible in the images of the nineteen men who attacked the WTC. They are pictured as men for whom much remained possible in this world, yet who sacrificed possibilities for eternal necessities. On September 11th, the men set in motion a course of action in which they would reach a point of no return. They were instructed in a letter to strike like champions who do not want to come back to this world. Once they had closed off mundane possibilities, the men would enter their sublime, the irresistible necessities of Allah. The men are seen in their own cultures to have completed themselves by negating themselves, while people killed by the actions of those men are mourned because they will never complete their organic lives.</p>
<p>Again and again, we must adjust our vision if we are to see events as the men in the planes could have seen them, crediting them with sincere faith and with profound concepts. In the perspectives of Islamic terrorists, martyrs and/or mystics, the negation of negations opens transcendental possibilities. So we have arrived at a different set of possibilities from the secular possibilities of the WTC. The conflict between religious and secular possibilities is uneven, because secular possibilities are disadvantaged by confusion in their relations with renunciations, and self-negations. The contemporary American secular is defenseless because it is foundationless and pathless, with no reasoned suggestions about what is to be done now.</p>
<p>The destructions at the WTC are mystical acts, negations of negations in order to produce a positive good. The fundamentalists are people who proudly judge that they know the good for other people better than those other people know their good for themselves. As usual, the sin of presumption is overlooked by radical fundamentalists who presume to know the good for themselves, for other people and for Allah. So let those men be mystics, but then allow that mystics can be good or bad, constructive or destructive, while taking a terrible chance by gambling on their supposed knowledge of the will of Allah. Notice that on September 7th, “Atta goes to Shuckum’s Oyster Bar and Grill in Hollywood, Florida with Marwan Al-Shehhi. According to bar staff, Atta spends almost 4 hours at the pinball machine drinking cranberry juice, while Al-Shehhi drinks alcohol with an unidentified male companion.” Mohammed Atta’s name suggests a soul of humility. He meditated at a pinball machine, playing a series of games for hours, perhaps humbled by a machine that submits a ball to the interplay of gravity, a technological contrivance, and a human knack. He looks to me like nothing so much as a man contemplating his life as a purposeless game of pinball until he annihilates himself in his mystical marriage…</p>
<p style="text-align:center">********</p>
<p>The effects of September on my family were mild, and no one is complaining. I had no worries about my family, with one daughter at work for an art’s agency in Manhattan, another daughter teaching in Ohio, and my son working somewhere on an architectural project. His wife and son were visiting her family in Ireland. After I saw the North Tower collapse, I made some rough calculations and walked home. Soon an e-mail message arrived from Cork, Ireland: DO NOT PANIC. My daughter-in-law Mary Quinn Wilson, my grandson Jackson, and Mary’s mother, Anne Quinn, had emplaned from Dublin. The message reported that the plane had returned to Dublin, but the message was wrong. While the words DO NOT PANIC have scarred my memory, my anguished moments are nothing when compared to the griefs of people cherishing their children on the other planes, those being used as instruments of faith.</p>
<p>Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower carrying two parents, Daniel Brandhorst and Ronald Gamboa, married for ten years. This couple, as an outward sign of their love, had adopted at birth three years earlier their son, David. Whatever the two men had suffered, they had subsumed it in tenderness for their son with whom they were flying home. Then understand that three-year-old David disappeared with his two fathers, in a place that is no longer a place.</p>
<p>A constructed family like that of Daniel, Ronald, and David held open a system of family that has never been as closed as some people like to think. These two men did not reject an ideal of family in order to follow their whims. And they did not renounce their innate desires for the sake of abstract ideals. They used the materials they had been given to construct a family somewhere between an ideal family and a possible family, giving the love they had to give as they could give it.</p>
<p>The approach of these men to the grace of life did not require them to act violently, either to prove their participation in transcendent ideals, or to demonstrate their obedience of immanent desires. If they were like most people most of the time, adjusting the rival claims of transcendentals and of immanences, that is my point. Muddling through among amiable doubts, familial uncertainties, marital compromises, and parental imperfections seems to me more constructive than actions devised to prove either pure transcendence or pure immanence. A triangle does not need to be an ideal in the mind of God, it can be an abstract object near enough to be within our reach. Without the impossible infinities, Euclidian geometric forms become useful in specifications for actual shapes in poured concrete, not models of impossible transcendental perfection.</p>
<p>I am not saying more than that the way we live now, for all the ills it sees, and for all its lack of absolute foundations, is better than pursuit of an extreme purity that is proved by violence against the “impure.” Even if the terrorist-pilots were mystics, some mystics are idolaters of self, overestimating their power and righteousness. Even I can quote Scripture: “Do not become righteous overmuch, nor show yourself excessively wise. Why should you cause desolation to yourself?” I suggest that submission to this wisdom of Solomon is fully in accord with submission to the will of Allah, at least as Mohammed the Prophet conveyed it.</p>
<p>And me? I am seventy years old, and my years have fallen into a structure of early possibilities, later probabilities, and now, my season of poignant harvests. I saw the first Tower collapse, and hours later saw dust rise as the third building collapsed. One afternoon a few days later, walking onto a nearby pier, I put one and one together - many people were wearing masks, and I had a troubled awareness in my breathing. I sensed from the mildest difficulty that I was breathing dirt from floors falling onto lower falling floors, pumping out unthinkable dust that no machine could breathe for us. Obviously our breathing could never be virtual or simulated breathing. At no time could representations or simulations or spectacles suffice. I can say that on September 11th, that while my metaphorical floor was knocked out from under me, and that my metaphorical breath was knocked out of me, I nevertheless needed to stand on a literal floor and to breathe the dubious air.</p>
<p>Certainly our realities are so manipulated into mere images that people sometimes fear that they cannot stand and breathe in their own reality. What is there to say, if speaking from a commitment? In <span class="booktitle">Work on Myth</span>, Hans Blumenberg asks us to question an apparent impossibility: “But what if there were still something to say, after all?” One something that can still be said is that Americans are going to have to produce the truth about the end of exemptions for beauty and goodness. 9/11 annihilated the assumption that America was exempted from the suffering like that of people who live with perpetual terror. If we had any exemptions, we forfeited them: America has been ugly for a long time.</p>
<p>However, justice must listen to appeals, and as an open system should grant retrials. As my last whim, turning my thought toward possibilities, I quote Ralph Waldo Emerson’s hopeful note: “There is an elasticity in the American mind which may redeem us….”</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/wtc">WTC</a>, <a href="/tags/islam">islam</a>, <a href="/tags/ellen-schwamm">Ellen Schwamm</a>, <a href="/tags/world-trade-center">World Trade Center</a>, <a href="/tags/yamasaki">Yamasaki</a>, <a href="/tags/allah">Allah</a>, <a href="/tags/united-states">united states</a>, <a href="/tags/minaret">minaret</a>, <a href="/tags/allah">Allah</a>, <a href="/tags/religion">religion</a>, <a href="/tags/politics">politics</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator826 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comLiteral Arthttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/programmatology
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">John Cayley</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-11-29</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>“The Pixel/The Line” was our rubric, a constructive irritant for the statement that follows. It implies, for me, an “and/or,” a contrast/linkage, a characteristically problematic relationship between graphic art and what I now call literal art. Moreover, since “line” is ambiguous, and “pixel” less so, it inclines toward an equally characteristic and underlying assumption that graphic art is predominant in certain contexts, including this context, that of digital cultural production.<cite id="note_1" class="note">Graphic art in this context and others allows a continuity with visual art, fine art, and even conceptual and performance art; the relationship of verbal or literal art to these other practices remains problematic.</cite></p>
<p>“Pixel” is unambiguously associated with digital graphics. Moreover, on the terminal screens of digital media, pixels are used to build up the images of letters. The “atoms” of one system of digital transcription – graphics – provide, in this context, a preferred delivery medium for the atoms of another – writing. But apart from what is perhaps yet another opportunity for graphic art to patronise applied grammatology, it is not usually understood that there is any great significance or affect that accrues from this “BIOS-level” process of programmatological generation. After all, do constraints that are imposed on the manipulation of pixels in order that they produce the outlines of letters tell us anything about those letters or the words which they, in turn, compose?</p>
<p>Now contrast/link certain circumstances pertaining to the line. Lines may also, of course, be graphic elements; yet here, I assume, we are reading them as “lines” as in “lines of text” or “lines of verse”: conventional units of writing, with delineated and potentially elaborated sense. A line is a string of letters, and letters are the “atoms” of textual materiality. Letters build words and lines in a manner that allows far greater significance and affect to emerge from modulation in processes of compositional or programmatological generation. By this I mean simply that the way my algorithms and I string letters together to make words and lines generates significance and affect far more quickly and with far greater cultural moment than the way my algorithms and I string pixels together. Like the difference between <span class="lightEmphasis">changing the style of your font</span> and chngng th wy y spll or chaynjing thuh way u spehl.</p>
<p>Even this minute example reveals what I believe are profound differences in the way that our culture treats pixel and line. Note that rearranging the pixels of the words above engages considerations which are aesthetic and paratextual, matters of style, taste, mode, and so forth. all of which are undeniably meaningful and inalienably linked to the overall significance of, in this case, a phrase, a line, a fragmentary cultural object: <span class="lightEmphasis">changing the style of your font</span>.</p>
<p>By contrast, even rule-governed manipulations of letters in a cultural object of similar form, “size” and “weight,” immediately evoke notions of legibility, error, and appropriateness; and any aesthetic effects of this literal programming may be stunned by these considerations, which are, as I suggest, of greater cultural moment.<cite id="note_2" class="note">In case the rules are not obvious, they are: (1) spell without vowels and (2) folk-phonetic, or popular-language-guide spelling.</cite></p>
<p>Paradoxically, or perhaps for these very reasons, the programmatological and, specifically, algorithmic manipulation of pixels – to generate or modulate images as such (including the images of letters) – is undertaken with a far better grasp of the significance of such manipulation. <cite id="note_3" class="note">Because it is less directly engaged with signification; more a matter of inflecting acts of signification (although necessarily in a meaningful way).</cite> We all know, for example, what is suggested by algorithmic “blurring” as applied to an image, including the image of a word – it doesn’t change the word, it “softens” it, or whatever.<cite id="note_4" class="note">Of course, in discussions of rhetoric there is explicit appreciation of language tropes similar to “blurring,” for example. In fact, my “or whatever” here is a minute but effective blurring filter.</cite> With text, there is as yet no accepted repertoire of algorithmic manipulations from, for example, letter to word to line. An important task for writing in programmable media is to address these difficulties and disjunctions. Interaction with text must be founded on its specific materiality, on literal art.<cite id="note_5" class="note">For the materiality of language, of the symbolic, as it is here invoked, I recommend returning to Michel Foucault (1972), <span class="booktitle">The Archaeology of Knowledge</span>. Foucault is here working towards a definition of the statement in discourse and, while so doing, he makes clear the necessary difficulties and paradoxes of the materiality of language. Rejecting as its ground both any ideal underlying the statement, and the material of media that delivers statements, he characterises this substance as a “repeatable materiality,” one that depends on “possibilities of reinscription and transcription.” “The statement cannot be identified with a fragment of matter; but its identity varies with a complex set of material institutions.” In a sense the materiality of language arises from the fact of its being treated as an object that we “produce, manipulate, use, transform, exchange, combine, decompose and recompose and possibly destroy.” I would paraphrase this by saying that the materiality of language is a function of its programmability.</cite></p>
<p>The world of letters has played a crucial role in the development of digital art and culture. Text is indeed “the web’s primary and foundational media”<cite id="note_6" class="note">From Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s introductory remarks to SIGGRAPH 2001, panel AG1000, “The Pixel/The Line: Approaches to interactive text.”</cite> and the artists of text are poets. At first “poetic” does not seem promising as a preferred characterisation for a literary or literal art practice that shares in the critical challenges presented by so-called new media. Poets and their poems are the old “geniuses” and “masters” of both Enlightenment and Romance, not to mention High Modernism. But as a matter of recent historical fact, from Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de Des” to Jim Rosenberg’s “Intergrams” or Brian Kim Stefans’ “The Dream Life of Letters,” it is in the field of poetry and poetics that we have seen the most consistent and radical critical engagement with literal art. This argues that, in verbal art, if you wish to pursue a practice that might ally with that of contemporary digital art, then you would be wise to take a lead, or at the very least some cognisance, of contemporary poetics. However, I am making a stronger case, suggesting that poetics provides a preferred and even paradigmatic underlying or critical framework for what is currently called digital art, digital cultural production.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">*</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span class="lightEmphasis">Literal rather than digital art. Poetic practice informed by the materiality of language has greater power to articulate cultural production than ill-defined digital practice</span>.</p>
<p>I want to call attention to the bald abstraction and inadequate definition of the term “digital.” In general usage, the contrasting “literal” is a fairly flat term, associated either with letters themselves or with minimal, straightforwardly lexical relationships between linguistic signs and their potential significance. <cite id="note_7" class="note">Note that this is precisely what is disrupted by the rule-governed and entirely construable manipulation of letter arrangements in the tiny example above.</cite> By contrast, “digital” seems, shall we say, far more exciting and diverse. Why so? At best, in its literal sense, it pretends to point to the materiality of the media it addresses. In practice, it is usually a placeholder, a way of bringing together a diverse range of work, and then lending that work a gloss of novelty and innovation which is more often an accident of association with the hardware and systems on which the work is played out.</p>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">The Digital Dialectic</span>, edited by Peter Lunenfeld (1999), there is, of course, a more concerted attempt to define the digital, in digital systems that “do not use continuously variable representational relationships. Instead, they translate all input into binary structures of 0s and 1s, which can then be stored, transferred, or manipulated at the level of numbers…” (Lunenfeld 1999, xv). He then relates this to certain qualities of production in digital culture, exemplified through a contrast with analog photography: the digital is “stepped” (because of pixels) and “crisp.” He somewhat fudges the relationship of digital to the overarching project of “new media.”</p>
<p>For him the latter term is the placeholder struggling for its paradigm-position with “postmodernism” and others. In terms of media discourse analysis, the telling point in his extended definition is a necessary statement of what seems obvious: “As all manner of representational systems are recast as digital information, they can all be stored, accessed, and controlled <span class="lightEmphasis">by the same equipment</span> ” (Lunenfeld 1999, xvi [my emphasis]). This is manifestly now the case. All of the recording technologies discovered and developed since the late 19th century are digitized and therefore mutually transparent at the level of 0s and 1s. But what does this tell us about the <span class="lightEmphasis">qualities</span> rather than the <span class="lightEmphasis">facilities</span> of digital media?</p>
<p>I have proposed an alternate and more critically-theoretical generative definition of the digital. For me digital characterises any system of transcription with a finite set of agreed identities as its elements.<cite id="note_8" class="note">More fundamental elements in such a system may of course combine into larger entities and thus generate hierarchies of lower- and higher-order sets of composite elements.</cite> It follows that such a system allows: (1) programmatological manipulation of its constitutive elements (without any threat to their integrity); (2) invisible or seamless editing of cultural objects composed from these elements; and (3) what we now call digital (“perfect”) reproduction of such objects.<cite id="note_9" class="note">You can make a simple test to decide if you are dealing with digital system. Can you perform any of the above three operations? Are you sure that you are dealing with a system composed of quanta? Compare also the fundamental operations of storage, transfer and (conditional) processing in psychoanalytic thinking.</cite></p>
<p>The point to make here is that literary cultural production in its material manifestation as writing has always already shared these defining qualities of the digital.<cite id="note_10" class="note">See also John Cayley (1998), “Of Programmatology.”</cite> Although what I call programmatological manipulation of the elements of writing’s “digital” system has not often been self-consciously practised prior to the advent of our so-called “digital” age, it was a fully realised potential, as is demonstrated by the existence of, among other things, the <span class="booktitle">Yi Jing</span> (or Chinese Book of Changes), pattern poetry, acrostics, early universal language systems, the endeavors of the OuLiPo, the language of Joyce in <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span> and <span class="booktitle">Finnegans Wake</span>, the work of Emmett Williams, Jackson Mac Low, John Cage, etc. While all poetic writing might properly be seen as characterised by programmatological manipulation of literal materiality, in practice, especially since the Enlightenment and in the West, poeticising has been received as an inspired flow of organic lines recited from voices of genius. It is, rather, an alternative, radically formal tradition of letters projected from Mallarmé, through Dada into the currency of total syntax and post-Concrete visual poetry which nurtures programmatological literal art, linking to practitioners in so-called new media: Jim Rosenberg, myself, Brian Stefans, Paul Chan, and an increasing number of poetic practitioners gaining access to new tools.</p>
<p>On the other hand, seamless editing and digital reproduction has been an intrinsic and necessary part of literary culture throughout the entire history of writing, which, as a point of fact, depends (as does speech and all language activity) on “digital” reproduction: the eye must distinguish letters, bracket their accidents and recognise them as identities; the ear does the same with phonemes. Although print technology plays an important role in establishing and propagating these identities and the qualities they carry, please note that these “digital” qualities of writing are already present and persistent in any language technology. “Rose is a rose is a rose,” no matter how or where or on what it is written or spoken. The materiality of language establishes a poetic institution on the basis of this exchange.</p>
<p>It follows that the so-called digitization of literary phenomena is trivial and that “digital” is a redundant term (in cultural studies at least). It is used for media that would be better characterised as “literal.”</p>
<p>This may present itself as a ironic circumstance. I may appear to be proposing that we apply critical tools and criteria from a world of relatively conservative cultural authority, from print culture, from alphabetic minds, and attempting to use them to overdetermine our brave new world of networked and programmable media. However, it should be clear from what I’ve said so far that I am concerned with addressing the materiality of the media in question, rather than higher-order critical/theoretical structures. I’m trying, as it were, to turn our attention from lines of verse to the letters of literal art and to place the latter in a significant constructive relationship with the pixels of digital graphic art. My argument is that the material manipulation of pixels derives, culturally, from an underlying gasp of the manipulation of letters.</p>
<p>If the materiality of new media is indeed such a familiar and interiorized literal structure, then what is new about it? The answer to this is fairly clear to me. (1) There is genuine historical novelty and cultural innovation which emerges as a function of the discovery and development – at the end of the 19th century – of light and sound recording technologies. (2) More recently, in a related history that is still in train, we have, progressively, the ability to store, edit, manipulate and reproduce the material of art and culture in any and all of the recording and broadcast media available to us <span class="lightEmphasis">on the same equipment</span>.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">*</p>
<p class="epigraph">There is no software.<br /> – Friedrich A. Kittler (1997)</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">… the unacknowledged programmers of the real…</p>
<p>Friedrich A. Kittler (1990, 1999) and other media discourse analysts have suggested that culture may proceed by recasting or downplaying the materiality of language, and reprogramming its agents and subjects in terms of specific technologies and institutions. Such analyses, for example, “flesh out” the deconstruction of print culture as an expression of Romantic logocentrism. Following on from Foucault (1972), mixing in Lacan, and with passing critical acknowledgement of Derrida, Kittler provides us with documentary media history and sophisticated analyses in which, for example, the problematic of the voice and authority of the poet and (great) writer is engaged with media history: McLuhan with all of the advantages of poststructuralism and poststructuralist psychoanalysis.</p>
<p>As such, Kittler shares (with me, for one) in the project of unravelling the (male) mastery of poetic genius. For Kittler, the “age of print” – epitomized for this East German intellectual as the age of Goethe – was (and to an extent still is) a period when, ironically, technologies of writing achieved what he and others see as a perfected, transparent “alphabetisation,” which then recited or ventriloquized the concepts of authorship, originality, individuality, intellectual “property,” and (male) artistic and intellectual mastery.<cite id="note_11" class="note">See especially the chapters “The Mother’s Mouth” and “Language Channels” in Kittler, <span class="booktitle">Discourse Networks</span>. I am necessarily simplifying complex and rich arguments, which show how - in the discourse network of 1800 - the (maternal) voice reconfigured writing in a process Kittler calls ‘alphabetisation,’ concealing, for example, its literal, combinatorial materiality. “The Mother’s Mouth thus freed children from books. Her voice substituted sounds for letters… The educational goal of children in reading is to speak out the written discourses of others… Lacan’s definition of Woman exactly fits… She doesn’t speak, she makes others speak” (Kittler, <span class="booktitle">Discourse Networks</span> 34-35). “The Mother, or source of all discourse, was at the same time the abyss into which everything written vanished, only to emerge as pure Spirit and Voice” (Kittler, <span class="booktitle">Discourse Networks</span> 54).</cite> My first problem with Kittler’s analyses arises here. “Alphabetisation” is used paradoxically, and as an abusive term to indicate its opposite. In itself, the term unambiguously refers to the materiality of writing, to a popular conception of writing’s constituent structures. However Kittler uses it to refer to a system of inscription (his discourse of 1800) in which this alphabetic materiality has been recast and downplayed by the institution of the poet’s voice. The discrete literal entities of the alphabet have been successfully recited as a “smooth and continuous [analog] flow of personality.”<cite id="note_12" class="note">I owe this formulation to the translators’ introduction in Friedrich A. Kittler (trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz), <span class="booktitle">Gramophone, Film, Typewriter</span> (Kittler 1999, xxii).</cite></p>
<p>Kittler identifies the moment of radical reconfiguration of the discourse network with the moment of discovery and development of new recording technologies: photography (little discussed), gramophone, film. Undoubtedly it was a crucial moment, a moment “When Old Technologies were New,” and surely the jury must still be out over the questions of the significance of this or that technological innovation.<cite id="note_13" class="note">The reference is to Carolyn Marvin (1988), <span class="booktitle">When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century</span>.</cite> However, Kittler allows us to see that it is highly likely that the initial possibilities of: (1) recording and organizing the culture of sound; or of (2) recording and organizing the culture of light; or (3) recording and organizing, as it were, the culture of human time, will prove to be far more significant than the more recent discovery and development of programmable and networked symbol-processing machines. The role of the latter is recast as speed, convenience, manipulation and logistics (and perhaps the final emergence of posthuman culture), whereas the former technologies of 1900 radically altered the phenomenology and practice of so-called human culture.</p>
<p>In the world of language and letters, Kittler (1999) also discovers new writing machines, typified by the typewriter, of which computers are a sort of special case. <cite id="note_14" class="note">Kittler, 1990. See especially the relevant section pp. 183-263.</cite> However, whereas the recording technologies of sound and light lead to entirely new relations with the Real and the Imaginary, the typewriter seems merely to continue to recast or downplay the Symbolic and its materiality, at best further dismantling the voice of the poet by exchanging adoring female recitalists for controlled and controlling machinic female typists. <cite id="note_15" class="note">These are, of course, Lacan’s terms which, to grossly simplify, Kittler aligns with media as such: gramophone and the Real, film and the Imaginary, typewriter and the Symbolic. There are rich arguments and lines of thinking here, far beyond the scope of this paper.</cite> Momentarily, in media history, in <span class="lightEmphasis">verbal</span> art and culture, the materiality of the Symbolic is reasserted, but most clearly for Kittler this is as <span class="lightEmphasis">non</span> sense, the irrationality of arbitrary alphabetic transcription: Dada. For him, the media of symbolic manipulation, the typewriter/computer, including, perhaps, all programming, all software, is about to become machine and machine only: “the symbolic has, through Enigma and COLOSSUS, become a world of the machine.” (Kittler 1999, 262)</p>
<p>Yet it is hard to see how digitisation – by which I mean the digital transcription of any and all recorded data, sampled from the real – will fit into this current media discourse analysis, Kittler’s discourse of 2000. In more than one controversial essay, Kittler seems to show himself as a sort of hardcore reductionist, whose “so-called man” cannot be distinguished from machines that record, store, transfer and process, all with “no software” in the sense that, in the last analysis, there is nothing but “signifiers of voltage differences.” “When meanings come down to sentences, and sentences to words, and words to letters, there is no software at all. Rather there would be no software if computer systems were not surrounded by an environment of everyday languages.” (Kittler 1997, 150)</p>
<p>I have spent a good deal of time on Kittler not only because I believe that his arguments and contributions require attention, but also because I believe he provides us with one of the most sophisticated arguments explaining the most recent recasting and downplaying of the materiality of language, the subordination of line to pixel, in the context of so-called digital art and culture. How can one justify an engagement with verbal art, with language, when symbolic manipulation may be indistinguishable from the machinic symbolic? It’s far too tempting for workers in sound and light to adopt this supposition or to proceed with their work on its basis, in a hypercool posthuman irrational.</p>
<p>Of course, Kittler is concerned not only with media history but questions (after Foucault, 1972) of what, as such, a symbolic system is. If a symbolic system can be a softwareless “so-called man”-less machine, then that is a very significant conclusion. But it is unhelpful to a pragmatics of artistic production. Kittler’s statement that there ” <span class="lightEmphasis">would be</span> no software if computer systems were not surrounded by an environment of everyday languages,” (my emphasis) is crucial and telling. They are so surrounded. It is impossible to so-called-humanly conceive of them otherwise, and to work with, against and amongst them. Not only that, but all the other media, of sound and light, are inside them, or <span class="lightEmphasis">using the same equipment</span> (in more so-called human terms). Under these conditions, we cannot bracket or stun the materiality of language, the materiality of the symbolic, especially since it is our primary interface to the machine, for more than just historical or contingent reasons. The alternative is to abandon rich literal abstraction for the machinic banal or the machinic unconscious or the machinic real.</p>
<p>Linemakers, poets and writers generally, have long lost all claims to a mastery loaned to them by so-called print culture, by the discourse network of 1800. They must once again serve the literal matter of language, and as such they must serve the machine: typewriter, word processor, programmaton. Its <span class="lightEmphasis">literal</span> symbolic materiality should, in turn, be recognised as intrinsically and necessarily, not only historically or momentarily, engaged with the entire gamut of cultural production that emerges from the generalised, networked use of programmable machines. So long as we talk and write over the heads of COLOSSUS, an appreciation of literal art in this sense will enable a more significant and affective analysis of culture than that now accruing from screen-grazing pixelated transcriptions of sound and light in terms of a banal and minimally articulated abstraction: the 0/1 digital.</p>
<h2>Sidebar</h2>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/cayleysidebar" class="internal">Sidebar images</a></p>
<h2>Responses</h2>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/swoosh" class="internal">Nick Montfort responds</a></p>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/disambiguating" class="internal">Johanna Drucker responds</a></p>
<p><a href="/thread/firstperson/compiler" class="internal">John Cayley responds</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/poetry">poetry</a>, <a href="/tags/modernism">modernism</a>, <a href="/tags/mallarme">mallarme</a>, <a href="/tags/jim-rosenberg">jim rosenberg</a>, <a href="/tags/enlightenment">enlightenment</a>, <a href="/tags/brian-kim-stefans">brian kim stefans</a>, <a href="/tags/digital-dialectic">digital dialectic</a>, <a href="/tags/peter-lunenfeld">peter lunenfeld</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a>, <a href="/tags/yi-jing">yi jing</a>, <a href="/tags/book-changes">book of changes</a>, <a href="/tags/oulipo">oulipo</a>, <a href="/tags/ulysses">ulysses</a>, <a href="/tags/finnegans-wake">finnegans wake</a>, <a href="/tags/emmett-williams">emmett williams</a>, <a href="/tags/jackson-mac-low">jackson mac low</a>, <a href="/tags/john-cage">john cage</a>, <a href="/tags/paul-chan">paul chan</a>, <a href="/tags/friedrich-k">friedrich k</a>, <a href="/tags/friedrich-kittler">friedrich kittler</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1020 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/programmatology#commentsSkin Deep: Lynne Tillman's American Genius, A Comedyhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/skindeep
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Peter Nicholls</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2011-07-24</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>My parents had to have my dog put down when I was a kid. Later in life, I had a finely bred cat that went crazy and had to be destroyed. I have hemophobia which makes an ordinary blood-test an ordeal. So much I share with Helen, the narrator of Lynne Tillman’s recent novel <span class="booktitle">American Genius, A Comedy</span>. <cite id="note_1" class="note">Further references will be given in the text to <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>.</cite> No doubt there are other things we have in common, for Helen’s compulsively repetitive monologue at once invites and irritatingly repels such easy forms of identification. <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>, of course, is a book much concerned with such irritations, literal and metaphorical. In a very immediate sense, it is about the painful irritation of the skin: Helen suffers from the skin disorder “dermatographia,” literally “skin writing”, a condition that renders the body acutely sensitive to “inscription” by the external world (“I became aware that skin could be damaged by use” [24]).<cite id="note_2" class="note"><span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>, 69: “My condition, dermatographia or dermatographism, skin writing, is not life-threatening, but because of it my skin tingles, pulses, and itches, and if I were to stroke my arm with a fingernail, white lines would surface and be visible for at least fifteen minutes….in dermatographia only raised lines surface, which resemble writing on the skin.” See also <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>, 243.</cite> The motif of the self bound up in its own embrace - one part of the body itching another to relieve an itch - describes a reflexive loop of “self-touching” that provokes at the narrative level an equally and deliberately irritating habit of repetition.<cite id="note_3" class="note">See the fascinating discussion of itching in Steven Connor, <span class="booktitle">The Book of Skin</span>, 232ff. It would not be surprising if Connor’s book had influenced <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>, especially as it contains an account, with illustrations, of dermatographia.</cite> If the self has any stability here it is because it can always - always <span class="lightEmphasis">has</span> to - return to painful moments in the past. Helen’s “mental meanderings” (87) are initially quirky enough to be winning, but her tendency to be “easily distracted” becomes more querulous and self-serving as the novel proceeds - actually not really a “meandering” at all, but rather a doleful and (we sometimes think) self-deluding litany of sullen repetition: “My dog was given away by my parents, who pretended to love her but must not have, or if they did, it’s a mystery how they could have abandoned the beloved, innocent animal to a shelter and had it killed” (140). The event resists interpretation, but while its cause remains a “mystery” that doesn’t prevent it from becoming a focus for lasting resentment (“…I may not recover, because there are some things you don’t recover from. The past can’t be recovered or changed” [19]). At the same time, the constant rehearsal of these grievances makes them seem increasingly stylized, if not sentimentalized (“the beloved, innocent animal”), less a key to Helen’s inner self than one of a series of interconnected signs through which the obsessive patterns of a life may be narrated.</p>
<p>This is not, then, what would normally be termed a “psychological” novel, but one that is primarily concerned with what makes the illusion of psychic stability possible and sustainable in a world that seems to threaten it at every point. Just what that “world” is is also in doubt. Reviewers have wondered whether the novel is set in “an artist’s colony or a psych ward” (Winter), while Tillman herself has kept the mystery going by saying only that the narrator is one of a group of people “all cloistered together in an institution of some sort” (Tillman 2007)<cite id="note_4" class="note">Cf. O’Brien, “Interview” where Tillman says “still we don’t know where she is.” There are, I think, enough references to ill-health to make these claims for undecidability a trifle arch. See, for example, 187: “…the weight of the world is a burden. I am here to shuck it off, almost required to do it, otherwise I won’t feel well, do better, achieve a goal, and I must accomplish what I’m meant to do in life, there must be something.”</cite>. This indeterminacy is part of the “comedy” of the novel, though the wackiness of the community thinly veils the suffering of its members. Early in <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>, in fact, we are told that the narrator (as yet unnamed) is speaking from somewhere in which “I was sequestered with strangers in a place not unlike the one where I was sent to summer camp” (20). The memory of her fear and perplexity on that occasion haunts Helen’s later stay in this community, and there is for a second time confusion between incarceration and benevolent authority (Helen speaks in the same breath of the community’s “residents, or fellows” and of the camp’s “counselors”, but elsewhere it is hinted that freedom is illusory: “One resident or guest …prefers ‘guest’ as she insists she makes her own decisions” (171) and “many of the residents here are not equipped for life as it is commonly regulated, but they struggle on…” (43)).</p>
<p>In a conversation I had with Tillman back in 1995 when she was working on <span class="booktitle">No Lease on Life</span>, she described her aims as follows:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">I’m less certain now about what can be undone, though I still believe in talking and writing, making things or unmaking them if possible….I’m questioning notions of outer and inner, public/private, how each of us - how I - exist in a framework in which we are affected, bombarded, by the world, and still manage to think, feel, have our own worlds. (Nicholls, 284)</p>
<p>The skin, “the largest organ of the body” (113), perfectly encapsulates, conceptually and metaphorically, this sensitive interface as it “registers the inner world on the exterior, as the world external to it marks it as well” (64). The skin is at once “a containing and passively receptive surface” that expresses both our boundedness and separation and our extreme vulnerability in and to the world - “it can neither close like the eyes or the mouth, nor be stopped like the ears and nose” (Connor, 12, 15). <cite id="note_5" class="note">Cf. Benthien, 23: skin “serves both as a representation of the whole and as that which conceals it.”</cite> <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span> has no place for a classical distinction between mind and body, but speaks instead of the flesh in all its immediacy, the skin as zone of contact, “discontinuous and spasmodic, like the modern world itself” (Connor, 135). <cite id="note_6" class="note">Connor, 135. This is “the skin exhibited by hysteria” and, as Connor has already noted (132), the hysteric body “is always female even when it is male”.</cite> This distinction between “body” and “flesh” is helpfully clarified by Gerald Bruns who observes that</p>
<p class="longQuotation"><span class="foreignWord">Body</span> is a Greek concept. It is what has been shaped into a thing of beauty and object of regard; it is self-possessed, which means under control and capable of struggle and achievement….<span class="lightEmphasis">Flesh</span> meanwhile is a biblical concept (<span class="foreignWord">basar</span> in Hebrew). It is essentially passive and weak, torpid and shapeless, wet and fragrant, warm and luxurious, yet for all that driven and hungry because insatiable (concupiscent). Flesh is for eating and being eaten, whereas the body is defined by self-denial or self-transcendence. (Bruns, 707)</p>
<p>There is little hope of “self-transcendence” in Tillman’s novel, where the skin’s “blazing” and “flaring” is involuntary as it “reveals and encloses too” (70). Sometimes it announces what is only “skin deep” (which is fortunate [106]), at other times more ominously “skin lets us know that a surface often isn’t superficial” (31) and that the malady is systemic. The suffering “I”, of course, has no choice in the matter and this element of determinism colors the whole of <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>.<cite id="note_7" class="note">Compare Anzieu’s proposal that “the ego is the projection on the psyche of the surface of the body” (<span class="booktitle">A Skin for Thought</span>, quoted in Connor, 49). Cf. Anzieu, <span class="booktitle">The Skin Ego</span>, 208: “the Ego does indeed constitute itself upon a tactile foundation”.</cite> Helen expresses a deeply-held conviction when she declares that “about the most important things in life human beings don’t have much choice. I am making do, unmaking too, being as watchful and free as I can with what I’ve been born into” (87). The margin of possibility seems a narrow one: “I appreciate arbitrary direction, since mostly I have no choice, not about where I was born or to whom, into what skin or sex or town” (152). Such “arbitrary direction” might present itself through a Tarot reading or a séance, though these are only thematic solutions to a plot problem. At a deeper level, it is really only in the insistently repetitive structures of Helen’s own thinking that any kind of direction might be found. It is here that Tillman has her novel bear the weight of “think[ing] about being an American now” (O’Brien, 5), as she attempts to make the way that “Skin contracts and expands” provide a kind of structural figure for “what I wanted the novel to do: to move from small events and issues, like a facial or an annoying dinner party, to great ones, like American history, democracy, sensitivity, sex, race and racism” (Tillman, 2007).</p>
<p>The key to this string of concerns lies once more in a concept of “sensitivity” and its compensatory posture of “Sensory Defensiveness” (130): “the world,” declares Helen, “is increasingly poisonous, or toxic” (222) and “People have become more sensitive over the years” (99). This idea of increased sensitivity is at the core of the novel: being “sensitive” is what a liberal society encourages us to be, but as Tillman observed in a recent interview, “sensitive people aren’t any less cruel, and can be as cruel or crueler and very insensitive to other people” (O’Brien, 3). The skin disorders that “blaze” and “flare” in the pages of <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span> announce private pain, but also suggest that the sensitivity they express is perhaps the damaged remainder of an ethics of concern for the other that contemporary American culture has come increasingly to pathologize as weakness and anxiety. These skin deep signals are, after all, in contrast to the impervious “shallow, thick-skinned, insensitive character, an opportunist or someone so damaged as to be incapable of love and compassion” (33).</p>
<p>From this point of view, Tillman’s presentation of afflicted sensitivity strongly recalls the nineteenth-century invention of neurasthenia. That term, coined by George Miller Beard in 1869, gave a convenient name to a whole raft of otherwise seemingly unrelated physical and mental symptoms: “anxiety, despair, phobias, fretfulness, insomnia, nightmares, inattention, extreme fatigue, migraine, palpitations, indigestion, impotence, neuralgia, and many more” (Gijswijt-Hofstra, 39). <cite id="note_8" class="note">See, for example, <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>, 43: “they struggle on, the disconsolate woman who has psoriasis and is anorectic, a female radio announcer and musician with chronic fatigue syndrome, the young married man who pretends nothing afflicts him, the sodden, demanding man who consumes a fifth of vodka every night and is an irritant to my skin, like scratchy fabric, and others.”</cite>Interest in neurasthenia peaked in the years between 1900 and 1910; one hundred years later many of its symptoms return to trouble Helen and the community in which she lives. Once again, cultural pathology materializes as clinical condition: just as Beard had written that “American nervousness is the product of American civilization” (Gijswijt-Hofstra, 39), so the ubiquitous itching and eruption of the skin in Tillman’s novel is meant to tell us something important about what the title calls “American genius”. That phrase is at first sight something of a puzzle, given that the anxious and damaged characters of <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span> seem to have little or no claims to “genius” if that word applies to ability and achievement. Tillman, however, seems to be using the word to mean something like its Latin root in “generative power” or “tutelary spirit”. Late in the novel, Helen also refers us to Kant: “The Count’s seizure or paroxysm may have been fantastic, crotchety, a delirium, or poetic inspiration - furor poeticus - and, if so, it might approach genius, according to Kant” (273). In <span class="booktitle">Critique of Judgement</span>, Kant suggests that “it is probable that the word ‘<span class="lightEmphasis">genius</span>’ is derived from genius, that peculiar guiding and guardian spirit given to a man at his birth” (Kant, 151), and Tillman seems to be alluding to some national “spirit” which may encompass not only the usual sense of “genius” but also suggest other more negative features. In a recent interview, John Freeman observes that Tillman “still believes that the Constitution was a work of genius and the country itself a fabulous experiment. ‘Genius used to be a force of nature,’ she explains. ‘And it was there when the Constitution was written.’” (Freeman). <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span> puzzles over the subsequent history of this particular “genius”, name-checking some of its more clichéd forms: the habit of “starting over in the American way” (158), for example, or Helen’s recognition that, in true American style, she “had to keep moving” (159) and that “supposedly Americans play hard and work hard and have marketed this idea to the world” (16). Yet beyond these clichés, issued with necessary irony, the larger movements of American history amount to “a series of periods of individual colonists or members overcoming their own savagery” (90). The Puritan origins of America have produced a fetishism of wealth and celebrity - “The famous become paranoid” (173) - while the wretched story of Manifest Destiny and slavery induces a monolithic guilt that nothing can shake: “I can’t undo it, thinking doesn’t” (243). Nothing can obliterate these “scars” on the national body, a “trail of dead skin” that “never lets you forget the event” (176, 175) or the “self-serving assumptions” it so barely conceals (“I felt so sad about America, suddenly, I had left it, or it had left me” [241]).</p>
<p>Beneath America’s carapace of imperial muscle we now discover individual Americans “imprisoned in their skins” (58) or, like Helen, “encased in dry skin” (222). Painful, lacerated skin is but the first border to be defended against invasive attentions from others; Helen’s interest in what Contesa calls “the comedy of other people” (47) has always to be reined in, “since I generally want little to do with others who might intrude upon my feelings and insinuate themselves into my thoughts” (109). Other people are, at best, comic characters in some semi-theatrical performance (the Count, the Magician and so on); at worst, they provide a too easy route back to the self (as Helen observes, “interest in other people is also an interest in yourself” [41]). Yet this self-involvement is more than a matter of mere “interest”: the stakes are higher than that, and if American “genius” found its genuine and lasting expression in the ideals of the early republic, <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span> is painfully aware that individualism (“Everyone has an opinion and speaks it” - or a symptom and guards it) might also be the flipside of a thoroughgoing disregard of others’ needs (having concluded that the right to self-expression is “admirable”, Helen finds herself inquiring why people “care so much about what others think” [247]). Any original “genius” for social harmony now mutates into its opposite: “I vanished or disappeared inside myself, since I thought I knew what could destroy me and, actually, I’d mandated myself to protect my mind….” (147). <cite id="note_9" class="note">The phrase “protect my mind” also occurs in a context that suggests that this has a particular personal resonance for Tillman; see Freeman, 2 on her temporarily leaving New York City: “This is a tough town and it was not easy then if you didn’t know exactly what you wanted. I…had to protect my mind.”</cite></p>
<p>As Tillman has remarked in interview, however, “being able to escape from the world…is of course an illusion” (O’Brien, 5), which is why, instead of trying to stage such a “disappearance,” the novel does the opposite, deploying a finely calibrated periodic syntax to map the tenuous paths of connection between inner and outer. This is not, however, stream-of-consciousness prose, in part because the mechanism of the writing is constantly laid bare so as to expose, in its turn, the sheer contradictoriness rather than the naturalness of thinking. Helen tells us on a number of occasions that she</p>
<p class="longQuotation">…like[s] undoing and unmaking things, nowadays I take apart what I put together, pull one sticky side from the other, then scatter the bits on a table or the floor to see its fractured entirety. It’s innocent behavior, no one gets hurt, there was a whole object and then there’s an object ripped apart. (182)</p>
<p>That process of “unmaking” fully invests the prose of <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>, pointing up the contradictory drives that make Helen’s world such an edgy and “distracted” one, for at the same time as she wants to take things apart, she also desires order and wholeness:</p>
<p>“I want contentment and satisfaction, things falling into place, not apart, which is incongruent with my impulse to take apart and leave things in pieces on the floor” (230). But “congruence”, things in agreement, are also things that, like the events of Manifest Destiny, have unhappily fallen into place and now can’t be “undone” by thinking (243). It is the “sensitivity” that Helen is condemned to suffer that makes her thought a kind of “skin writing”: a painful incision that blooms and fades according to its own laws; an expression of vulnerability and uncertainty that must banish forever any hope of “contentment” or “satisfaction”. Tillman’s sentences are accordingly lengthy and elaborate, with rhythm constantly supervening on grammar so as to allow clauses to occupy adjacent positions without becoming “congruent”. One relatively short example:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The count strolled along the Seine and saw an antique blue watch, fell in love with it, and still loves and collects timepieces, Contesa read Kafka’s <span class="booktitle">Amerika</span> and, because he hadn’t visited it, she fell in love with his writing and mind, next with his brilliant cat-and-mouse letters to Felice, who may be Contesa’s <span class="booktitle">Amerika</span>, because she couldn’t visit her even in letters, whose symmetry she might enjoy, but I don’t remain faithful long to my person, others, and my interests, except I have habits, but resent them. (218)</p>
<p>Like skin, the comma both connects and divides. It may provide a narrative measure, as in the opening story of the Count’s discovery of antique timepieces, or it may force an unexpected apposition that will only be clarified later in the sentence (the comma before “Contesa” is initially ungrammatical and only pays off semantically when she, like the Count, is said to fall in love - in her case with the work of Kafka). But the network of relations is more complex than this, systematically modeled on a pattern of deferral and postponement. So Felice becomes Contesa’s <span class="booktitle">Amerika</span> because, of course, she can’t visit her. She may read her letters, but we can’t tell whether or not she “might enjoy” their “symmetry” because at that moment this reportage is interrupted by the more direct, tell-tale presence of Helen’s voice: “<span class="lightEmphasis">but</span> I don’t remain faithful long to my person, others, and my interests, <span class="lightEmphasis">except</span> I have habits, <span class="lightEmphasis">but</span> resent them.”</p>
<p>If there is one feature that defines the sentences of <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>, it is this use of subordinating conjunctions (italicized here) to disarticulate (“unmake”) the prose as it moves forward. The texture of the writing is at every turn conditioned by a fluctuating sense of discrimination and qualification. Nothing can quite “fall into place”, because no formulation is ever adequate to itself, to its own moment. Always there must be more speech, even though its explanatory power threatens to drain away in the profusion of qualifying terms. It is here that we can begin to see that “American genius” deals not at all in the currency of “self-evident” truths but rather in a quest for clarity that is constantly interrupting and undoing itself. Certainly, the particular “comedy” to which Tillman’s subtitle alludes has little of the witty fluency we associate with the best comedians and seems closer to the empty “comic” effects at work in Dostoevsky’s fiction, effects that Milan Kundera has aptly described as a “comical absence of the comical” that registers the “world of humorless laughter, where we are condemned to live” (Kundera, 21). Paradoxically, this particular “absence” characteristically announces itself in an <span class="lightEmphasis">over</span>working of syntax that makes the grammar of qualification and apparent discrimination the expression of a deep-lying negativity. Another example:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The brand of jeans that the odd inquisitive woman wears could have meaning, since everything means something, even if it is not anything much, negligible, or hardly worth mentioning, and, even though interpretations change and often meanings are temporary, especially those about a brand, her jeans still affect my relationship to her, since much harbors in trivialities, though not as much as in profound words and acts, whose significance can also be debated and more likely is. (154)</p>
<p>This long, choppy sentence tells us…what? That brand names mean something and affect one’s relationship to people who display them? But such signification is routine and tells us too much that is already familiar. Does that kind of meaning contrast, then, with the kind we might call “profound”? (Though it’s difficult to see how a <span class="lightEmphasis">word</span> can be “profound”….) And profundity is also “debatable” and “more likely” (or not) will turn out to provide just another occasion for unresolved disagreement. The pull of equivocation becomes habitual, a reflex of thinking itself (my own attempt to describe what is happening in Tillman’s prose has similarly become ensnared in a net of qualifying “buts”, “excepts” and “thoughs”).</p>
<p>This syntax of equivocation is not without precedent, of course, and one “American genius” comes instantly to mind, the Herman Melville of that darkest of novels, <span class="booktitle">The Confidence Man</span>. This is Melville’s most insistent exposure of language’s capacity to deceive and confuse, and as the following passage demonstrates, his studied use of correlative conjunctions slyly gives with one hand as it takes back with the other:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Goneril was young, in person lithe and straight, too straight, indeed, for a woman, a complexion naturally rosy, and which would have been charmingly so, but for a certain hardness and bakedness, like that of the glazed colors on stone-ware. Her hair was of a deep rich chestnut, but worn in close, short curls all round her head. Her Indian figure was not without its impairing effect on her bust, while her mouth would have been pretty but for a trace of mustache. Upon the whole, aided by the resources of the toilet, her appearance at a distance was such, that some might have thought her, if anything, rather beautiful, though of a style of beauty rather peculiar and cactus-like. (Melville, 50-1)</p>
<p>Through a maze of equivocations, Melville pursues the idea of a “beauty” that is actually not beautiful at all, with the aim of calling into question both positive and negative categories. By the time we reach the end of the passage, we have been told that Goneril is thought by some to be “rather beautiful” (she does have “deep rich chestnut hair), though as readers we find ourselves more repelled than seduced by her “cactus-like” nature. The twists and turns of Melville’s prose - “serpentine”, as he never fails to remind us - make us keenly aware of the linguistic moves that allow this confidence trick, bringing into sharp relief the conjunctions that facilitate a sleight of hand.</p>
<p>Melville’s way of illuminating the functions of what we usually think of as the “minor” bits of language - conjunctions and prepositions, for example - here predicts what would be a defining feature of a later modernism. Gertrude Stein would famously declare that “I like to write with prepositions and conjunctions and articles and verbs and adverbs but not with nouns and adjectives” (Stein, 128), and in this shift of attention to what she called the “background of word-system” she was applying to language the insight she had taken from the painting of Paul Cézanne: “Up to that time composition had consisted of a central idea, to which everything else was an accompaniment and separate but not an end in itself, and Cezanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole” (quoted Walker, 13). Stein used this insight to create the “continuous present” of texts such as <span class="booktitle">Tender Buttons</span>, texts ostentatiously freed from the domination of memory and representation, and freed thus to revel in a sensuous (and sensual) immediacy. Yet in departing from the modes of conventional narrative, Stein’s experiments aimed to generate pleasure from the exposure to language’s constituent elements rather than a Melvillean sense of their capacity to equivocate and deceive. Other modernists focused more directly on the “serpentine” potentials of discourse. In Fitzgerald’s <span class="booktitle">Tender is the Night</span>, for example, a text that sometimes resonates with <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>, the founding acts of Nicole’s abuse by her father are hidden away, “shut…into their Victorian side-chambers” like so many errant sub-clauses whose sinuous motion similarly works to conceal the truth (Fitzgerald, 143).<cite id="note_10" class="note">Nicole observes that the clinic in which she is being treated “has been good for languages” (142), though later we are told that, rather like the location of <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span>, it “was no longer a single dark and sinister building but a small, scattered, yet deceitfully integrated village…”</cite></p>
<p>The connection between syntactical equivocation and a past that is occluded or grasped only by intimation is, of course, even more graphically displayed in the fiction of William Faulkner. His massive, unfurling sentences and almost impossible parentheses are well known, but note also again the play with conjunctions:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">He did not pause, did not take that day or two to let the bones and flesh of fifty-nine recuperate - the day or two in which he might have talked, not about us and what we had been doing, but about himself, the past four years (for all he ever told us, there might not have been any war at all, or it on another planet and no stake of his risked on it, no flesh and blood of his to suffer by it) - that natural period during which bitter though unmaimed defeat might have exhausted itself to something like peace, like quiet in the raging and incredulous recounting (which enables man to bear with the living) of that feather’s balance between victory and disaster which makes that defeat unbearable which, turning against him, yet declined to slay him who, still alive, yet cannot bear to <span class="lightEmphasis">live with it</span>. (Faulkner, 130, italicized in original)</p>
<p>Such passages, with their calculated deferrals - “yet…still…yet” - and their emphatic relative pronouns whose designation remains nonetheless stubbornly unspecific - “that feather’s balance” - these stylistic devices promise to carry us toward the past even as they make our distance from it ultimately untraversable.<cite id="note_11" class="note">On “deferral” in Faulkner’s prose, see Glissant, 9: “Faulkner’s books have always seemed to me to work this way. Deferred revelation is the source of his technique. This has nothing to do with the suspense of a detective novel or with social or psychological clarification; rather, it is an accumulating mystery and a whirling vertigo - gathering momentum rather than being resolved, through deferral and disclosure - and centered in a place to which he felt a need to give meaning.”</cite><span class="booktitle">AGAC</span> does not, of course, invoke the intense Faulknerian desire for historical depth though it shares its ever-present sense that the future has somehow already been lived through, that it yields no promise of a distinctively new horizon. <cite id="note_12" class="note">See, for example, Sartre, 85: “The coming suicide which casts its shadow over Quentin’s last day is not a human possibility; not for a second does Quentin envisage the possibility of <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> killing himself. This suicide is an immobile wall, a <span class="lightEmphasis">thing</span> which he approaches backwards, and which he neither wants to nor can conceive” (emphases in original).</cite>Tillman’s novel ends with yet another facial treatment - “I close my eyes, and she goes on” [292]) - and this “going on” bespeaks circularity and deferral rather than any real forward movement, an itching to relieve an itch, or Kafka playing cat-and-mouse with Felice. Those letters of Kafka’s that Contesa falls in love with in fact disclose a “symmetry” (218) or formal balance that is also a kind of deadlocked recognition that no action will be taken or be possible. “I shall not come to see you,” writes Kafka to Felice’s parents, “it would be unnecessary torture for us all. I know what you would say to me. You know how I would take it. So I am not coming” (Kafka, 560). The visit doesn’t happen because it has already been played out in advance, just as we assume at the end of <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span> that Helen’s skin condition will only be temporarily relieved by the Polish woman’s “going on.”</p>
<p>The dark “humorless laughter” that Kundera finds in Dostoevsky is here too, a “laugh with no comical cause” that finds its object in Tillman’s own labyrinthine syntax, a syntax weighed down with explanatory connectives but finally unable to reveal any plausible pattern of causality. The sentences of <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span> become in this way increasingly <span class="lightEmphasis">typical</span>, producing (to borrow a nice phrase from Edouard Glissant) recurring “sites of exasperation” (Glissant, 169). Take this example:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Name isn’t in the Zulu manual, and that’s a pleasant surprise, <span class="lightEmphasis">since</span> everywhere I go, people learn each others’ names, <span class="lightEmphasis">though</span> here only first names, <span class="lightEmphasis">because</span> it’s considered an imposition to know a fellow resident’s last name, <span class="lightEmphasis">as</span> it might reveal more than the person wants, <span class="lightEmphasis">since</span> society, the one I now inhabit especially <span class="lightEmphasis">but</span> all of it that I know <span class="lightEmphasis">too</span>, sometimes needs anonymity and protection. (169; my emphases)</p>
<p>“Since”, “because”, “as”: so the “explanation” proceeds, seeking a figure of causality that the rhythm of the writing works insistently to obscure and undermine. There is a darkly comic urgency about such sentences that, with their deep-seated “itch” to qualify and refine, finally secure nothing but verbal “anonymity and protection.” Equivocation, it seems, provides a necessary line of retreat, exemplifying the “American genius” for elaborating a defensive skin to secure the borders of the self. The syntax of the novel, with its endless complex deferrals, is in this respect at once highly privatized (it constitutes the very mode of Helen’s being-in-the-world) <span class="lightEmphasis">and</span> hopelessly public, stylized, and affect-less (as Jean-Paul Sartre observed of a parallel tendency in the prose of John Dos Passos’s <span class="booktitle">1919,</span> “It will not take you long…to decide that you <span class="lightEmphasis">cannot</span> use this tone in talking about yourself” [Sartre, 95]). <cite id="note_13" class="note">Cf. Sartre, 92: “But beneath the violent colours of these beautiful, motley objects that Dos Passos presents there is something petrified. Their significance is fixed. Close your eyes and try to remember your own life, try to remember it that way; you will stifle” (emphases in original). In the passage from <span class="booktitle">AGAC</span> just quoted, for example, would I actually say about myself that I “inhabit a society”? As Sartre observes of <span class="booktitle">1919</span>, “The narration takes on a slightly stilted manner, and everything that is reported about the hero assumes the solemn quality of a public announcement…. “</cite>Between these two poles, “history” becomes skin deep, a painfully reticulated surface expressing that particular aspect of “American genius” epitomized in Helen’s refusal “to cherish or memorialize memory, create and keep it in its own image, call its loss a sacrilege, confuse it with nostalgia” (242). Perhaps, finally, then, it’s not “history” at all: “it may be that there’s no time, only the peculiar winsome present,” Helen reflects (88), a present, that is, when narrative lasts only as long as the “flare” of skin-writing and is consequently doomed ever to repeat itself.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Anzieu, Didier. <span class="booktitle">The Skin Ego</span>. Trans. Chris Turner. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989.</p>
<p>Benthein, Claudia. <span class="booktitle">Skin: On the Cultural Border between Self and World</span>. Trans. Thomas Dunlap. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.</p>
<p>Bruns, Gerald L. “Becoming Animal (Some Simple Ways).” <span class="booktitle">New Literary History</span>, 38 (2007): 703-20.</p>
<p>Connor, Steven. <span class="booktitle">The Book of Skin</span>. London: Reaktion Books, 2004.</p>
<p>Faulkner, William. <span class="booktitle">Absalom, Absalom!</span> New York: Vintage International, 1986.</p>
<p>Fitzgerald, F. Scott. <span class="booktitle">Tender is the Night</span>. New York: Scribner, 2003.</p>
<p>Freeman, John. “Lynne Tillman: The author who inspired the Manhattan avant-garde.” <span class="booktitle">The Independent</span> (16 August 2010).</p>
<p>Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter. Ed. <span class="booktitle">Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War</span>. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001.</p>
<p>Glissant, Edouard. <span class="booktitle">Faulkner, Mississippi</span>. Trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.</p>
<p>Kafka, Franz. <span class="booktitle">Letters to Felice</span>. Trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974.</p>
<p>Kant, Immanuel. <span class="booktitle">Critique of Judgement</span>. Trans. and introd. J. H. Bernard. New York: Hafner Press, 1951.</p>
<p>Kundera. Milan. <span class="booktitle">Encounter</span>. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins, 2010.</p>
<p>Melville, Herman. <span class="booktitle">The Confidence Man: His Masquerade</span>. Ed. Hershel Parker. New York and London: W. W. Norton &amp; Co., 1971).</p>
<p>Nicholls, Peter. “A Conversation with Lynne Tillman.” <span class="booktitle">Textual Practice</span>, 9. 2 (Summer 1995): 269-84.</p>
<p>O’Brien, Geoffrey. “Interview with Lynne Tillman.” <a href="http://bombsite.com/issue/97/articles/2856:%201-12" class="outbound">http://bombsite.com/issue/97/articles/2856: 1-12</a></p>
<p>Sartre, Jean-Paul. Literary Essays. Trans. Annette Michelson. New York: The Wisdom Library, 1955.</p>
<p>Stein, Gertrude. <span class="booktitle">Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909-45</span>. Ed. Patricia Meyerowitz. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984.</p>
<p>Tillman, Lynne. <span class="booktitle">American Genius, A Comedy</span>. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2006.</p>
<p>Tillman, Lynne. Interview, 2007. <a href="http://americareads.blogspot.com/2007/02/pg-69-american-genius-comedy.html" class="outbound">http://americareads.blogspot.com/2007/02/pg-69-american-genius-comedy.html</a></p>
<p>Walker, Jayne L. <span class="booktitle">The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons</span>. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.</p>
<p>Winter, Jessica. “American Ingenious.” <a href="www.slate.com/id/2151371" class="outbound">www.slate.com/id/2151371</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/lynne-tillman">Lynne Tillman</a>, <a href="/tags/american-genius">American Genius</a>, <a href="/tags/style">style</a>, <a href="/tags/trope">trope</a>, <a href="/tags/novel">novel</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a>, <a href="/tags/fiction">fiction</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1370 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comBlack Postmodernismhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/fractured
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2008-01-10</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Madhu Dubey has been an original voice in African American literary criticism for some time. In her first book, <span class="booktitle">Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic</span>, she examined novels by Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Alice Walker in order to argue that the novels interrogate and negotiate central privileging binaries of nationalist discourse, including individual/community, past/future, and absent/present subjectivity. <cite class="note" id=" note_1">Madhu Dubey, <span class="booktitle">Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic</span> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 21.</cite> Her critique of a “nationalist aesthetic” (and a black nationalist aesthetic) was leveled on two fronts: first, that such an aesthetic was complicit with essentializing contemporary social discourses concerning the black family, and especially concerning black women; and second, that such an aesthetic posited specific, preformulated relations to community, the past, and subjectivity through the privileged genres of poetry and drama, relations questioned by black women novelists who explore the other sides of these binaries. Her <span class="lightEmphasis">feminist</span> claim was that black women writers address African American subjectivity with many of the social and aesthetic concerns shared by black male writers, but that the women also claim a unique female relation to these questions. Her distinctly <span class="lightEmphasis">postmodernist</span> move was to situate black women’s fiction in a relation of negotiation rather than opposition to the essentialisms undergirding the (male) nationalist aesthetic: women’s fiction hesitates between a realist, historiographical mode of representation and an aestheticizing linguistic signification that is both suspicious of essentializing black discourses and of poststructuralist claims to “absence” and “empty signifiers” (a suspicion born of historical circumstance, the fact that absent presence has always been the place accorded by whites to signifying blackness).</p>
<p>Implicit in her study, then, was the claim that African American female novelists were the voice of new black postmodernism, one that refused to ignore the realities and history of black experience in the world but that simultaneously rejected essentializing nationalist discourses about black Being and homogenizing notions of poststructuralist “play.” Implicit also in her study was the claim that while the formal techniques of this fiction resembled that of other postmodernist texts, black postmodernism was different in the specificity of its social conflicts and the history with which it grappled, and thus even its formal techniques had unique cultural valences.</p>
<p>These two claims are continued in Dubey’s lucid and ambitious second book, <span class="booktitle">Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism</span>. <cite class="note" id="note_2">Madhu Dubey, <span class="booktitle">Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism</span> (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003).</cite> In this book she continues her critique of the nationalist, racial discourse concerning the “underclass” as it impacts the material lives, self-identities, and aesthetics of African Americans. Her scope has widened to include a more complex context but also narrowed in terms of aesthetic focus. The context is the postmodern city, and the aesthetic focus is the “book within a book” trope (and also the appearance of writing/reading as plot element or theme). She brings these together in an original thesis: that the printed book and notions of urban community traditionally have been tied together in cultural discourses; that both the postmodern city and black literary postmodernism worry and fracture the authority of the book and the cohesiveness of urban community; that reading and writing are both material practices and hermeneutical methods; and that the convergence of these two phenomena is uniquely significant to African Americans as a demographic group and as the producers of a distinct literary tradition.</p>
<p>Since the 1970s, Dubey claims, African Americans throughout the U.S. have become predominantly an urban people, and this affects their ability to construct models of racial representation situated within, or growing from, organic communities. In addition, whatever cohesion that black Americans might have found even within the postmodern state has been further fractured by post-Civil Rights-era developments, such as the expansion of the black middle class, the redistribution of Rust Belt industry to new national and global geographies, and the debilitating sociological discourse about the urban “underclass.”</p>
<p>There are three responses to this fracturing. The first is the creation of a nationalist rhetoric of crisis; in Dubey’s eyes, this rhetoric often in fact undergirds much of postmodern theory. In this rhetoric of crisis, African American urban culture is both the problem and the cure: as problem, it is made to exemplify urban crisis (the crisis of the family, the crisis of agency, the crisis of poverty, the crisis of drugs and crime), while as cure, it is made to represent a reinvigorating, “residual” missing element in postmodern culture (bodily presence, a connection to the Real, political intentionality, orality and performance modes of being).</p>
<p>In this regard, Dubey is unsparing and dead-on in her criticism of postmodern cultural studies: it often falls into the trap of equating material oppression (e.g., poverty) with political opposition (the poor and marginal are, <span class="foreignWord">de facto</span>, oppositional); it tends to primitivize African American urban culture by making it signify a “romance of the residual” (understanding everything from hip-hop to sexuality as an authentic alterity); it mines sites of oppression for their cultural capital, fetishizing and aestheticizing the racial other; it often equates aesthetic self-reflexivity with political action, and texts that foreground their status as mediated representations are seen as militating against racial essentialism (e.g., if it’s not realism it’s not racism); and it often celebrates technology as a surrogate for politics (7-10). “Indeed,” she writes, “a synthesis of aesthetic indeterminacy and racial essentialism, allowing us to have our cake and eat it too, may be defining of postmodern approaches to racial representation in literature” (10).</p>
<p>The second response to the fracturing of postmodern urban community is by literary and cultural African Americanist critics, who attempt to refurbish “models of community and of racial representation developed earlier in the century” by nationalist cultural politics (5). Dubey identifies two dominant critical paradigms in this African American literary and cultural criticism and shows how they have shifted in the discourse of postmodernism. The modernist “uplift paradigm” shifts to a postmodern populist paradigm, and the modernist print paradigm shifts to a postmodern “vernacular paradigm.” In discussing these paradigms and particularly when discussing their shifted forms, Dubey takes to task nostalgic attempts to essentialize black culture in the interest of finding a bedrock for new black urban community. Cornel West and bell hooks fare badly here, but so at times do Toni Morrison, Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Ishmael Reed, Houston Baker, and the black aesthetic.</p>
<p>For example, in her fourth chapter “Reading as Listening: the Southern Folk Aesthetic,” Dubey examines the return by black writers such as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor - but also Alice Walker, Houston Baker, Addison Gayle, John Oliver Killens, Kiarri Cheatwood, Toni Cade Bambara, and other scholars such as Carol Stack and Eugene Genovese - to “the rural South of the days of racial segregation” in order to recover a version of coherent black community, born out of oppression but nonetheless resolving in many ways the problems created by postmodern urbanism. The Southern folk aesthetic, celebrating orality (listening over seeing), presence, magic/conjuring, feminine epistemologies, and nonmediated communication, is nostalgic to the core and creates an “antimodern, anti-urban, and antitextual model of community,” but its “harmonious, crisis-free acts of knowing, speaking, and listening” are logical responses to the lack of social stability and cognitive dislocation of mediated urban realities (170). It also counters the “glib embrace of multicultural rhetoric” characteristic of scholarship on postmodern urbanism (which Dubey discusses in chapter 3), a rhetoric based in scopic regimes that erase the real material and political divisions within urban contexts for a “culturalist” model based on discourse practices (185).</p>
<p>This is all very smartly done, and it is a brave counter to easy acquiescence of reigning critical shiboleths. Yet because of her (perhaps necessarily narrowed) focus on African American contemporary literature, Dubey also does not explore how her claims are mirrored in criticism of other U.S. literatures. While she insists on the historical and cultural specificity of African American culture and literature, virtually all of the problems (and attempted solutions to those problems) she identifies in contemporary African American literary criticism have surfaced in Native American contemporary literatures and cultures as well - the problem of postmodern urbanization, the problem of writing/reading as mediated acts, the return to nostalgic or essentializing notions of unmediated race, past, tradition, or orality; feminization and magic as responses to technologizing, alienating (male) presents. These responses also have surfaced in new Southern literary studies and in Latino/a literature and theory, and in criticism of the “magical realist” mode there has been some controversy over their desirability or social efficacy. Dubey’s argument centers on the cultural specificity of African American postmodernism, yet how are these cross-cultural similarities then to be explained? Is there something structural in academic discourse of otherness, or simply in human cultures, that promulgates these critical solutions to problems of urban alienation?</p>
<p>Dubey identifies a third response to the fracturing of community and identity characteristic of postmodernism, and this is the poststructuralist celebration of anti-essentialism, becoming, flow, absence, and nonidentity. This option is basically just thrown out by Dubey, but in an interesting way. First, she acknowledges that this approach does nothing for oppressed peoples who from the get-go struggle to create identity, maintain community, and satisfy material needs; black postmodernism that goes down this path supports the aesthetics of absence that have always been the marker of African American identity in the eyes of the white majority. Dubey also, however, observes that this theory of postmodernism often attempts to construct reality as both unmediated experience (as in the flows of Deleuzian schizoanalysis or the celebrations of WWW or the postmodern city as experiential “webs of information”) <span class="lightEmphasis">and</span> hypermediated experience (as in theories of Baudrillardian simulation or spectacle). She responds, in solidarity with other Marxist critics of postmodernism, that “some notion of the real is a necessary fulcrum for oppositional political visions” (192). <cite class="note" id="note_3">It is odd that Dubey does not make central to her argument the many Marxist critiques of postmodernism that surfaced in the 1980s and 1990s, such as Alex Callinicos’; <span class="booktitle">Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique</span> (St. Martin’s P, 1990), Christopher Norris’s <span class="booktitle">What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy</span> (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1990), Terry Eagleton, <span class="booktitle">The Illusions of Postmodernism</span> (Oxford and MA: Blackwell, 1996), or Fredric Jameson’s magisterial <span class="booktitle">Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism</span> (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989).</cite> But she also astutely notes that rhetorics of hyperreality, simulation, and poststructuralist “flow” in fact often solve the problem of simulation and lack of grounding by positing physical proximity: “the way out of the labyrinths of the simulacral city lies in face-to-face contacts with others” (192). She doesn’t buy this desire for a metaphysics of presence: “This desire for a mystical encounter with the ‘nonrepresentable’ or ‘naked’ face of the other is the inverse side of claims about the decline of reality in postmodern times; both exemplify reactive responses to an environment so thoroughly mediated that the technological frames themselves have become invisible” (193).</p>
<p>Thus while sympathetic to all three of these attempts to construct a basis for urban black community (the last, poststructuralist response is her least favorite), Dubey ultimately rejects them in favor of what she sees as a truly postmodern alternative. One of the beauties of this text is that Dubey has done her homework and is willing to state uncomfortable truths honestly: the arguments are complex, tightly woven, and based in indisputable realities of critical discourse. Her prose is imaginative and her arguments are logical in sometimes impressive ways. Unlike much contemporary work in cultural/race/ethnicity/gender criticism, which often suffers from disciplinary myopia, Dubey ranges widely through postmodernist theories of space, cities, architecture, urban development, and cultural studies; central to her study are works by David Harvey, Guy Debord, Edward Soja, Marshall Berman, Hal Foster, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, Andreas Huyssen, and others. <cite class="note" id="note_4">Guy Debord, <span class="booktitle">Society of the Spectacle</span>; David Harvey, <span class="booktitle">The Condition of Postmodernity</span> (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990) and <span class="booktitle">The Urban Experience</span> (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Edward Soja, <span class="booktitle">Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory</span> (New York: Verso, 1989) and <span class="booktitle">Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places</span> (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Marshall Berman, <span class="booktitle">All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity</span> (New York: Penguin, 1982); Fredric Jameson, <span class="booktitle">Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism</span> (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); Hal Foster, <span class="booktitle">Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics</span> (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985); Andreas Huyssen, <span class="booktitle">After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism</span> (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).</cite> Her own study supports the claims of aesthetic indeterminacy but eschews claims of racial essentialism: she asks, “how exactly do we keep alive a notion of the real without resorting to metaphysics or mysticism?” and answering, against Baudrillardian theory, that we must consider the real “that eschews both organicism and technological fetishism, innocent mimesis and textual inflation” (11). <cite class="note" id="note_5">The historical materialist focus of her research base also leads her to some omissions of key texts in both postmodern culture theory and critical race theory. For example, she never cites Linda Hutcheon’s work on postmodernist fiction, yet the claim in <span class="booktitle">Signs and Cities</span> that black postmodernist fiction constructs the book as a compromised, mediated, and self-reflexive response to postmodern reality is very close to Hutcheon’s claim about postmodernist fiction as paradoxically and “fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political.” On the other hand, Dubey could get a lot of mileage out of Hutcheon’s claim that “There is no dialectic in the postmodern: the self-reflexive remains distinct from its traditionally accepted contrary - the historico-political context in which it is embedded.” See Linda Hutcheon, <span class="booktitle">A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction</span> (New York and London: Routledge, 1988).</cite></p>
<p>Instead of nostalgia for unmediated reality characteristic of black nationalism or the Southern folk aesthetic, or the celebration of ungrounded pluralism characteristic of postmodern (multi)culturalism or technocratic utopianism, Dubey presents the work of Samuel Delany as an example of a response that acknowledges the potentially positive, cosmopolitan consequences of recognizing and negotiating both a completely mediated reality and encounters with others - also, inevitably, completely mediated (even at the level of visuality, of faces). “Delany’s novel,” she writes, “aspires to an alternate ideal of civility understood as a relation of tolerance among strangers, demanding difficult acts of mediation and incomplete comprehension. This is, of course, an urban ideal” (193).</p>
<p>Dubey’s analysis is indebted to the work of Raymond Williams and aligns itself with the historical materialist branch of theory. Yet this book ends by advocating an almost Habermasian ethic of the public sphere or even a modified Rawlsian “justice as fairness” way of being in the world of strangers. This would not be an ethics of the “face-to-face” but an ethics based on law and public, urban negotiation where trust, familiarity, and community could not taken for granted as givens and where inequality was a recognized reality of the system. As Dubey notes in relation to the Southern folk aesthetic, “Social justice cannot always be immanently derived from concrete, face-to-face relations and often requires mediation by abstract political principles as well as extra-local adjudication” (152).</p>
<p>The book thus ends by calling for something like a race-conscious, materialist version of Liberal cosmopolitanism. This is the place of slippage between all the sociological and theoretical information about postmodern urban theory in the book and all of the close readings of texts that Dubey provides. First, while the former gives a context for the latter, it doesn’t give a <span class="lightEmphasis">necessary</span> context, and second, the marxist tenor of most of the theory with which she sympathizes does not really translate into the “solution” offered at the end of the book. The last chapter does not advocate workers’ revolutions or concrete, materialist solutions to the problems of poverty, race segregation, capitalist urban development, and global postindustrial production. In some ways, it can’t, because of the overall argument’s inherent suspicion of nationalistic, globalizing discourse and because Dubey so desires literature to speak to and for social reality. She instead uses Delany’s fiction and nonfiction as a model and advocates coexistence based on difficult negotiation of difference and law (with metaphors of <span class="foreignWord">mestizaje</span> hanging in the perimeters)–almost a pure cosmopolitan ideal. It will be interesting to see if in future books Dubey enters into the emerging theoretical conversation about cosmopolitanism, for while she seems to be advocating a kind of cosmopolitan ethic, she clearly has no sympathy with multiculturalism (or, I suspect, liberalism) and is starting from a markedly different theoretical and cultural standpoint than are most liberal theorists, such as Appiah, currently involved in that conversation.<cite class="note" id="note_6">Anthony Appiah, <span class="booktitle">The Ethics of Idenity</span> (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005) or <span class="booktitle">Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers</span> (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).</cite></p>
<p>This book is being marketed as the first book to consider what it means to speak of a postmodern moment in African-American literature. This is patently wrong; other studies appeared that have addressed what a black postmodernism might look like. (Dubey in fact cites and takes issue with many of these in her book).<cite class="note" id="note_7">Dubey herself cites little work done concerning race and postmodernism, such as V. Lawrence Hogue’s <span class="booktitle">Race, Modernity, Postmodernity</span> (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), or the substantial work done concerning the intersections between feminist theory and postmodernism.</cite> The book also needs a bibliography, and it would have been better if Dubey had analyzed a broader range of novels to illustrate her claims (the same books appear chapter after chapter, and her hero worship of Delany is a bit annoying).</p>
<p>Yet <span class="booktitle">Signs and Cities</span> makes a good case for a distinctive African American strain of postmodernism. One of the real strengths of Dubey’s book is to complicate even this idea, however, so that it doesn’t harden into the idea that there is such a thing as a monolithic Black Postmodernism. Dubey takes into account the diverse nature of the national African American community, as well as diverse approaches to the problem of urban postmodernism, and produces a book well worth reading by any scholar in contemporary studies.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/toni-morrison">toni morrison</a>, <a href="/tags/gloria-naylor">Gloria Naylor</a>, <a href="/tags/alice-walker">Alice Walker</a>, <a href="/tags/houston-baker">Houston Baker</a>, <a href="/tags/samuel-delany">Samuel Delany</a>, <a href="/tags/cosmopolitanism">cosmopolitanism</a>, <a href="/tags/multiculturalism">multiculturalism</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a>, <a href="/tags/african-american-studies">African-American studies</a>, <a href="/tags/urbanism">urbanism</a>, <a href="/tags/ethnic">ethnic</a>, <a href="/tags/inequality">inequality</a>, <a href="/tags/literacy">literacy</a>, <a href="/tags/modernity">modernity</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1235 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comThe Database, the Interface, and the Hypertext: A Reading of Strickland's Vhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/isomorphic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
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<div class="field-item even">Jaishree Odin</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2007-10-14</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The uniqueness of a new-media work is the mobility of its elements, present as binary code in computer, yet capable of being mobilized into action through user interaction or through programming. Many new media works make full use of multiple functionalities of current software applications, bringing to light in unique ways the effect a well-designed interface can have on the meaning-making process. How do we read these digital texts that mutate with the touch of a key? What is the role of the medium in the meaning-making process? Though I explore these questions, I also attempt to go beyond them to see if new media works can serve as a lens to reflect on the postmodern condition. Strickland’s <span class="booktitle">V: Losing L’una/WaveSon.nets/Vniverse</span> (2003), with a dual existence in print and the electronic medium, is especially useful for this exploration. It is self-reflexive as it comments on both reading and writing practices. It also lies at the intersection of multiple discourses of science, technology, philosophy, literature and art. V is thus ideal for exploring not only how media specificity contributes to the reading experience, but also what the paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity implies about reading, writing and living.</p>
<p>Lev Manovich (2001) in a perceptive analysis of new media works makes a distinction between database and narrative. Historically speaking, narrative has been associated with the novel and the film. With the advent of the new media, a new category of narrative has come into existence that is intricately linked to the database - a collection of items that constitutes the content of the work and exists as binary code in computer. Unlike the print medium where content is the same as the interface, the database produced by the writer for the digital medium needs an interface to make it accessible to the user. For the first time we have a distinction between the content of the work and the interface to access it. In fact the same content now can be accessed in multiple ways.</p>
<p>In this respect hypermedia literature can be compared to collage or montage (Landow 1999). Unlike the flat surface of traditional collage, however, the digital representational space is dynamic in nature. A traditional collage, including assemblage and montage, is created through combining materials from different sources which exist in fixed relation to one another whether spatially or temporally. Earlier scholars regarded collage as the best representation of modernist aspirations to achieve aesthetic immediacy, <cite class="note" id="note_1">Cubist collage has been seen in terms of experimentation with the frame. Broken frames, no frames, or frames absorbed partially or completely in the field of representation, Karsten Harries writes, represent a prelude to a turn away from the mimetic function of art as it brings the viewer’s attention to the work’s autonomy. Harries links the use of broken frame to the broader state of postmodern culture where people have lost faith in metanarratives and sees the broken frame symbolizing the condition characterized by the absence of any metaphysical ordering of the world. A postmodern interpretation, however, shift the focus from any search for ground to exploring the process of coming into being of the world or artwork.</cite> but in recent postmodern reinterpretations by art historians have described cubist collage as a reaction to the modernist desire for aesthetic immediacy in that such works, in fact, create multiple fields of reality that exist in dynamic interrelations with one another in a unified representational space. <cite class="note" id="note_2">Brockelman comments on the two antithetical views of collage; collage aspiring to ‘presence’ or ‘aesthetic immediacy’ and collage as antirepresentational nature. It is precisely this ambiguous nature of collage, this oscillation between two opposite meaning contexts that makes it ideal for studying the postmodern condition. In a collage, “sense is something to be made rather than secured…[it] both insists that we learn to live without guarantees of meaning (the reality of ‘knowing our place’) and opens the possibility for a kind of meaningfulness that we ourselves produce though a process of judgment.” (Brockelman 2000: 37).</cite></p>
<p>Reading digital collage is vastly different from that of reading/viewing traditional collage. It is capable of functionalities and user interactivity, which have dramatic implications for both the writer and the reader. Software applications make it possible to create a work with text, sound, animation, or image, each of which can be programmed to appear onscreen in a variety of ways. The user interaction is thus only one of the ways shaping the screen display. Not only are the reader’s eyes and hands engaged in a playful interaction with the text, but also the work itself can acquire a certain degree of intentionality. The individual textual units can materialize on screen and in turn become the surface to access other textual units in a hypertextual collage, which can be entered from any point.</p>
<p>In a print text like Mark Z. Danielewski’s <span class="booktitle">House of Leaves</span> (2000) where a high level of collage effect is achieved through skillfully using footnotes, letters, stories, stories within stories, different fonts, blank pages, upside down pages, it is still possible to get an overview of the whole work, at least visually. In an electronic text, on the other hand, no such visual mastery is possible as the electronic narrative unfolds in time like film, even as it is different from film in that the database cannot be seen, but only accessed. In the digital work, Manovich writes, the database is permanent and real whereas narrative is virtual as readers can trace their own path through the narrative. In film, on the other hand, narrative is real and the database is virtual in that film is the final product of the film crew’s work with the database of possible shots and scenes. What was in the background in film is foregrounded in new media works and accordingly, the reader/user experience is transformed too as hypertext reading can be seen as multiple reading possibilities through the database of the work.</p>
<p>In electronic literature or art works, thus, a second layer on top of the content has to be created in the form of the interface. The linkages and their organization can determine what is visually presented on the screen when the user acts on the text. The database logic that governs new media works introduces a whole set of new possibilities of conceiving a work. The interface can be programmed in ways that the assembling/disassembling of the semantic and graphic elements can take place in a variety of ways. The database elements can be broken into smallest meaning-making components and programmed to assemble into larger or smaller semantic units through reader interactivity with the text. The graphic design of the interface can add further nuances of meaning to the unfolding text. In the hypertext environment, the visual dimension of seeing the text becomes as important as reading it.</p>
<p>In the early hypertexts, the verbal textual segments and the links joining them constituted a major aspect of the writer’s artistic strategy to create a hypertext. <cite class="note" id="note_3">The early hypertext theorists (George Landow, Michael Joyce, Jay Bolter, and others) accordingly focused primarily on the linked structure of the electronic text. That could partially be attributed to the limitations of the electronic medium during that period which allowed easy access to the functionality more geared toward manipulation of verbal text through programs like Storyspace and Hypercard. In last decade or so, new commercial software applications and authoring programs have made it possible to include image, sound, and animation in the electronic text.</cite> As electronic literature has become more sophisticated, the exclusive attention to the written chunks of text and linking have been seen by some recent critics as very limiting since this leaves out the medium’s contribution to the reading experience. <cite class="note" id="note_4">The transparency of print surface was maintained through the development of writing conventions that minimized its presence as a medium (Lanham (1993). Since print medium has promoted the convention of a transparent interface, the role of the medium in shaping reading experience has not been taken into account in literary criticism. The artists’ books of the nineteen sixties and seventies which draw the reader’s attention to the materiality of the book occupied the periphery of literary production and did not have any substantial impact on how theorists and critics perceived the role of the medium on the unfolding or exploring of a particular literary work (Hayles 2002).</cite> In new media works, no longer do the reader’s actions alone determine the course of the narrative. The interface design can contribute to the meaning-making process, too, as the medium itself acquires some sort of intentionality. Onscreen displays can be made reversible or irreversible through programming as the reader interacts with the text.</p>
<p>Various components of electronic narratives, for example, database of content, the material interface, and the mouse-overs or the keyboard clicks of the reader destabilize the earlier one-to-one relationship that the reader had with the print text while at the same time bringing to the forefront the materiality of the medium. To what the media makes possible with respect to accessing the text is added another dimension of the role media itself in the meaning-making process.</p>
<p>The complexity of the material medium which contains as well as ‘performs’ the text has a great impact on how the text unfolds as well as how the reader explores and experiences such a text. The strategic release of verbal, graphic or sometimes even audio content is an important part of the artistic strategy in a variety of new media works, including hypertexts with highly visual and multi-media interfaces. Some new media writers/artists focus on the verbal text as the centerpiece with the links constituting an important aspect of accessing the database, for example, M. D. Coverley’s (aka Marjorie Luesebrink) <span class="booktitle">Califia</span> (2001). Coverley makes an extensive use of multi-media content to create an interface that is as much a guide as a means to access the database of diverse elements. The multiple layering in <span class="booktitle">Califia</span> is achieved through the mixing of music, artwork, fiction, history, myths and legends as well as photographs and maps that add a rich texture to the text which the reader can explore in multiple ways. Similarly, Caitlin Fisher’s <span class="booktitle">These Waves of Girls</span>, an associative hypertext, is a web of memories created through linked chunks of text with images. Talan Memmott’s <span class="booktitle">Lexia to Perplexia</span> approaches the whole question of web-based writing from a totally different perspective as he meditates on the coming into being of words and sentences as codework that reflect a coalescence of theory and fiction. The unfolding of text engages the reader visually. Jackson commenting on this text writes: “Mmmott borrows as much from the conventions of html code as from the not much less difficult codes of Deleuzian theory, metamorphosing them into a jammed, fractured diction full of slashes, dots and brackets. There is a purpose to this besides play, since the piece is about the code-mediated relationship between the reader, the (electronic) text, and the author” (Jackson 2001).</p>
<h2>Strickland’s <span class="booktitle">V: Losing L’una/WaveSon.nets/Vniverse</span></h2>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">Writing Machine</span> (2002), Katherine Hayles proposes ‘Media Specific Analysis’ as an aid to read new media works. Kaye, Hayles’ fictional persona in this work, calls all texts ‘technotexts’ that interact with their own materiality and possess three characteristics: chunked text, links, and multiple reading paths. The materiality of technotexts cannot be specified in advance as it is an emergent property and comes into existence through the interactions between the physical properties of a work and its artistic strategies. Such texts give physical form to both content and artistic strategies which the user sets into motion through her interaction with the interface. In other words, “materiality depends on how the work mobilizes its resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user’s interactions with the work and the interpretive strategies she develops - strategies that include physical manipulations as well as conceptual frameworks” (Hayles 2002: 33). In the electronic text the medium thus becomes an important part of the reading experience, as it can be used by the writer/artist in creative ways to reflect on the meaning-making process or contribute to the meaning(s).</p>
<p>Hayles’ Media-Specific Analysis can be used as a heuristic tool to see how a rhetorical form, for example print text, is transformed when it is instantiated in the electronic media. If a print text is transported from the print medium to the electronic medium, the changed environment, in which the verbal text materializes, impacts the meaning making process. A text that lends itself to such an analysis is Stephanie Strickland’s <span class="booktitle">V</span> (2002) a collection of poems with dual existence, in print as well as electronic medium. In the print medium, <span class="booktitle">V</span> is an invertible print book with two beginnings: <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> and <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>, both pointing to the middle of the book that refers the reader to the web-based section called <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>. It is as if the print book is cleaved into two halves and out of it emerges the electronic version of <span class="booktitle">V</span>.</p>
<p>In that <span class="booktitle">V</span> has dual existence, it allows the reader to become aware of how medium specific possibilities and constraints shape a text. Strickland has not simply transported the contents of <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> into the electronic medium, but she, in collaboration with Cynthia Lawson, has totally reconceived the material of the print text in creating the electronic <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>. The <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> of <span class="booktitle">V</span> can be seen as the external database of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>, but the latter is a work in its own right which means that database cannot be equated with a new media work - <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> is <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> and much more. The artistic strategies as reflected in the design of the interface have added interpretive layers to the work that do not exist in the print <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>. It shows that the visualization of the navigational space of a new media work is as important as the creation of the database of verbal and graphic materials.</p>
<h2><span class="booktitle">V</span>: The Print Text</h2>
<p>Each side of print <span class="booktitle">V</span> could actually serve as the front of the book, though the publisher has arbitrarily chosen <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> as the back by using it to provide the publishing information. <cite class="note" id="note_5">In a private communication, Strickland notes that the publishing material was meant to be printed on a shrink wrapper, but Penguin doesn’t use shrinkwrapping of its books.</cite> After the reader goes through one part, s/he must invert the book physically to start the second part. By making the reader handle the book in specific ways to proceed with the reading, Strickland brings the materiality of the print book to the forefront. Another strategy used to bring the reader’s attention to the medium is by breaking the continuous print text into smaller textual units. In <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span>, the poems are divided into triplets by creating number headings and subheadings, which serve the purpose of breaking the linear flow of the individually titled poems, while at the same time, by differential numbering, connecting many of those poems while isolating others. In <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>, one long continuous poem is broken into forty-seven numbered parts, even though the text of most of the sonnets runs into the one following.</p>
<p>Through the strategic use of numbering, the poet seems to suggest to the reader not to take the linear presentation of the print medium for granted. The broken poetic units can be read in a different order or a different sequence. In a poem called “Errand Upon which we Came,” the poet gently coaxes the reader to begin anywhere and skip anything because the text is designed for that purpose. A linear way to read the book is not a better reading than the one that involves taking detours. The poet compares the reader who follows a meandering path to a leaping frog who does not know which elements he belongs to as he follows the arc of his flight. The reader is thus advised to not get stuck into linear progression of the poem, but take chances and hop from one to another. The edifice on which the work stands includes not only the artistic strategies used to create the work but also the imaginative universe to which the configuration of textual elements allude. So in the poem, the roots or the language or words on which the work stands are not the object of recovery, but the indefinable and ungraspable seen in terms of relationships as the reader is asked to dig up the roots to see what lies beyond.</p>
<p>The overall structure of the work is guided by the metaphor of coding both at the structural and thematic level. A literary work can be seen as a code pointing towards a predetermined reality where there is a one to one relationship between the words and what they signify, or the coded words can be regarded as generative in nature in that simple words or expressions can appear in complex variations leading to different hierarchies of meaning. If <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> is regarded as 0 of the binary pair 01, then <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> is 1. <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> is losing the one, or in other words, it could mean return to nothingness or to the zero state - dissolution or disappearance. Thematically, <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> refers to various strategies of reading and seeing, whereas <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>, as one large wave of sonnets spread over 47 pages of the print book, focuses on multiple discourses that shape experience. Whereas <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> mourns the loss of Simone Weil, metaphorically represented by the disappearance of the moon as the dawn approaches, <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> celebrates the rebirth of the poet who now has become one with her muse.</p>
<h2><span class="booktitle">Vniverse: The Electronic Text</span></h2>
<p>The title page on both the front/back or back/front of the print book includes its mirror image in the dark “wedge of the sky”, suggesting that the contents of each part are reflected structurally or thematically in the electronic <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> of dark sky and bright stars. It seems <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> is structurally isomorphic with the electronic <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> to the extent the print medium would allow it, whereas <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> is thematically isomorphic with it in that the print Son.nets of this section appear in different mutations in the electronic <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>.</p>
<p>Whether it is a reflection or not, or whether it is isomorphic or not, the web-based <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> can be regarded as a work in its own right, though a richer reading could result if the print components are read alongside the electronic component. If the print version is seen as an external database for the electronic version, it is an excellent way to see how the text mutates with the change of the medium. In the electronic medium the <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> are transformed, both in how they unfold and how the navigational process impacts the meaning-making process. The unfolding of sonnets in <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> is dynamic as it depends on variety of factors, including how the reader interacts with the electronic database of sonnets and how the computer responds to that interaction. This is not a one-way interaction since there are some facets of the unfolding sonnets that are not under the reader’s control.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> can be seen as a meditation on the relation between computer processes, user interaction and the sonnets. The reader is invited to enter the universe of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> and her interaction with the stars and star diagrams of the interface releases complete sonnets or sonnet fragments. The release of the sonnets is intricately linked to the diagrams of star constellations that appear and disappear by the user interaction. Navigational space in <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> is not just a transparent window to access the work but becomes an integral part of its signifying practices. In the exploratory navigational space of the interface, the machine processes, reader actions, verbal content and artistic strategies used in the work construct reader’s subjectivity. Since hypertext involves reader’s active encounter with the text, the reader becomes an integral part of the topological space created by the interaction s/he has with the electronic text. In fact, hypertext reading experience can be regarded as a sort of body writing - the path the reader traces marks the materialization of the text as well as the reader’s nomadic subjectivity.</p>
<p>Perhaps, here again we can refer back to what the poet has to say about navigation in electronic environments. In <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span>, a quoted passage comments on how shift to computerized navigational techniques has changed the aviator’s relationship to the skies. In this shift, the direct relationship to the universe has been lost. The same is true in the case of electronic sonnets of <span class="booktitle">V</span> where the reader’s direct experience of the database of semiotic signifiers is mediated by the interface that displays the text after it goes through a series of translations from machine code to digital code to natural language displayed on screen. The appearance and disappearance of diagrams of star constellations, an integral part of accessing the electronic text, add other interpretive layers. One wonders if the dual existence of sonnets in print as well as electronic space reflects the poet’s need to retain the direct experience of the text for the reader, even as she uses the electronic media and its varied navigational functionalities as well as design possibilities to re-imagine these sonnets.</p>
<p>In an essay on the creation of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>, Strickland compares the reader to the nomadic travelers of the ice ages whose movements on the ground were guided by the patterns of stars in the sky they invented. (Strickland and Lawson “Making the Vniverse”). In creating the interface of dark sky with stars and accompanying diagrams of star constellations, the work evokes the ancient practice of using star patterns in the night skies to help people navigate the oceans or serve as guide to plant and harvest crops. The patterns or shapes that people saw when they grouped stars in the night skies varied from culture to culture as did the stories or myths that accompanied these constellations. The constellations and stories were thus symbolic in nature and reflected the world of which they were a part. For today’s sedentary reader glued to the computer screen, Strickland produces an electronic sky with constellations or diagrams as the guide to the meaning making process. Various invented star constellations that appear in <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> are: Swimmer, Kokopelli, Broom, Twins, Bull, Fetus, Dragon Fly, Infinity, Goose, and Dipper. The star constellations appear and disappear as the reader moves the cursor across the screen. The diagrams can be stabilized by double clicking on any of the stars along the path of the constellation. A set of keywords is associated with each constellation, which serves as clue to the thematic content of a particular constellation. The diagrams give some sort of fixity to the release of sonnets grouped under each constellation. However, in spite of this fixity, there is a movement involved in the released fragmented or complete sonnets through reader’s mouse-overs or keyboard clicks. The readers are challenged to create their own sonnets out of the sonnet materials that appear and disappear as they interact with the text.</p>
<p>The star diagrams serve as a navigational aid and serve as the electronic version of the table of contents for <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> that is missing in the print version. Here we see the electronic form in dialogue with the print form.</p>
<p>The <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> sonnets are the sonnets included under <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span> of the print book, but divided into 232 triplets in the electronic space and programmed to be released through reader interaction either as triplets or as complete sonnets. The number of times the stars are clicked determines the version of sonnet that is released - individual triplets along the constellation path, complete print-version sonnet, or complete triplet-version sonnet. The triplets can also be released by typing the sonnet number in the dial on the right hand top corner of the screen. Interestingly, the numbering of the triplets is different from the numbering of the print sonnets, with the result, if the reader types 45 in the dial, the triplet that is displayed onscreen is not the triplet from Sonnet 45, but rather from Sonnet 9 in the print version. This is because the electronic sonnets are divided into 232 triplet units whereas the fifteen-line print sonnets are only 47 in number.</p>
<p>Even the way the complete sonnet is released is interesting, in that one of the triplets associated with it appears in color as other parts of the same sonnet are slowly released. The title of the sonnet, an important semantic indicator in the print version, appears toward the end in this display. In the electronic space of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>, therefore, the triplet in color serves the function of the title of the completely released sonnet and becomes semantically important. The electronic version thus undermines both the sequentiality as well as the top to down reading practices of the print sonnet.</p>
<p>If <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> (print text) triplets are compared to <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> triplets, once again there is a great difference in how they can be accessed or experienced in either medium. In <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>, the reading is time-based in that each reading is unique and dependent on a variety of interlinked factors as the reader interacts with the text. Even though the release of triplets associated with each constellation is fixed, how the reader interacts with each star diagram determines the sequence of the release of either triplets or sonnets, so many new versions of sonnets can be formed. <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> thus foregrounds the materiality of the medium as it adds to the meaning making process. In the print version, even though the linearity of the print sonnets is broken through numbering, the reader tends to read across the numbered division to maintain the linear flow of the sonnet. The difference in how triplets appear in print and electronic version shows that electronic space is infinitely flexible and mutable both from the writer’s and the reader’s perspective. The electronic media has its own specificity which is very different from the print media.</p>
<h2>Reading <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> with its External Print Database</h2>
<p><span class="booktitle">V</span> in its entirety is a work not only about how to read but also how to see, in the literal sense of seeing the poem as it unfolds before the reader’s eyes in the electronic starlit sky and also reading it by spelling out the words as the triplets are released a letter at a time. The work is also about what lies beyond this act of reading/seeing as it points to the imaginative universe that is reflected in the navigational space of the work. In <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span>, the poet refers to any discourse as a ‘fabricated lens’ to see the world, but if this lens is imaginatively handled, the language constituting each discourse is itself seen as a lens which reflects a world of its own.</p>
<p>How does the poet conceive of the reader of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>? The reader is not just to notice the existence of different discourses or images and record them diligently, but the reader needs to quiet the mind and look beyond the stars of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> to grasp ‘the profound correlation’ between the concrete and the abstract or “become part of the conversation that physical truths enter into with numbers…musical numbers, scores, patterns, algorithms.” To see is not simply to grasp the material reality of a particular object or occurrence as it appears in isolation, but it is to grasp the whole context, the web of relations, in which it materializes, and to go beyond that to experience the primordial rhythm or force which permeates it.</p>
<p class="poem" align="left">1.29</p>
<p class="poem" align="left">
a hand-mind that reaches for<br />
its breast, a mouth not<br />
held back,</p>
<p class="poem">1.30</p>
<p class="poem">
by pattern upon pattern giving way to deeper<br />
grasp giving in to rhythm or<br />
vibration or milk. (<span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> 7)</p>
<p>In order to grasp the relationships, the reader needs to develop strategies of seeing which involve not encountering the object of study head on, but looking at it sideways, so that the fringes or the edges are the focus of attention - the edges where one discourse merges into another. Thus, the poet says:</p>
<p class="poem">1.13</p>
<p class="poem">
Advice<br />
from an astronomer: avert<br />
your eyes, look away</p>
<p class="poem">1.14</p>
<p class="poem">
to see better,<br />
to avoid,<br />
the blind spot hidden deep…</p>
<p class="poem">
in order “to enhance/ your ability/ to see near threshold of what can”</p>
<p class="poem">1.17</p>
<p class="poem">
be seen. For something right<br />
on the edge, try the blink method: first look away<br />
from, then, directly at. What</p>
<p class="poem">1.18</p>
<p class="poem">
appears, when you turn aside, disappears<br />
when you look back. (<span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> 3-4)</p>
<p>Thus, seeing is not mastering the object of one’s gaze in order to fit it in a pre-determined map - but rather to open oneself up to its multiplicity. The sonnets are not messages for the reader, or they are not written as a code for the reader to break, but they are meant to open a channel, a passageway for the readers to traverse in order to hear answers to the questions that they pose to the text. There is no final truth to be conveyed by the poet, because the poet has not seen it. Both hand and mind need to work together as the reader moves the cursor in <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> to experience the web of relations that connects human beings to nature and to natural cycles of life and death.</p>
<p>The print text of <span class="booktitle">V</span> serves as the external memory of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> both for the reader and the writer and the combined work becomes more a journey to explore contemporary reading/writing practices. The interplay of the print <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>, as external memory or database, and the electronic <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> sonnets bring to the forefront the materiality of the print text and how it differs from the electronic text. A reading session of Vniverse is definitely not the same as a reading session of the print <span class="booktitle">V</span>. The print text makes it possible to comprehend it in its entirely, as the reader can go back and forth to individual sonnets to see how they fit into the poet’s ecology of ideas which the reader has now made her own.</p>
<h2><span class="booktitle">V</span> as a Reflection on the Condition of Postmodernity</h2>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">The Politics of the Postmodern</span> Linda Hutcheon (1989) argues that cultural postmodernism has been wrongly charged with a lack of critical awareness as instead of promoting one specific world or worldview, it promotes eclecticism regarding the worlds, worldviews, historical periods, representational media or strategies. The critical postmodern literature in fact “foregrounds and thus contests the conventionality and unacknowledged ideology of that assumption of seamlessness [of history/fiction or world/art] and asks its readers to question the processes by which we represent our selves and our world to ourselves and to become aware of the means by which we make sense of and construct order out of our experience in a particular culture” (1989: 53-54). Strickland engages in postmodern re-appropriation of historical materials in V through evoking the life of Simone Weil. The evocation of Weil is not to provide one more interpretation of the specific events or figures in the past, but rather to insert them in the present so the present can be re-seen and re-evaluated with and against the past which in some cases has been forgotten and in other cases suppressed. Weil is the guiding force behind the poems in <span class="booktitle">Losing L’una</span> and her life is used as a lens to view human life and the world.</p>
<p>Strickland ‘s <span class="booktitle">V</span> does not just point to the conceptual universe of which it is a part, but it is an enaction of what it is to live and to create in a postmodern world. The creative vision does not necessarily involve mastering all discourses or embracing all cultures, but rather in opening a channel for seeing the web of relations that connect the worlds and worlds within worlds that we inhabit. <span class="booktitle">V</span> reflects on its own origins in multiple discourses of science, mathematics, poetry, philosophy, and biography. For the adult poet, each word holds a world of its own even as it is linked to hundreds of others. What appeared as divided and separate as a child to the poet now appears to her as an interconnected web of relations. Thus, the word ‘circuit’ or the word ‘lens’ evoke images of the circuits etched on silicon chips by women who sit in sanitized rooms looking though lenses, marking the chips. But whose markings are these? The question here alludes to the story of the exploited women who etch the marks on silicon chips, but the marks are not their own. Multiple discourses are embedded in this simple question which brings together the political, the scientific and the technical in one single question. The reader is thus provoked to get into a dialogue with the text to ask questions or to find answers as s/he disassembles the discourses that are brought together in the work.</p>
<p>A characteristic feature of a postmodern work like Strickland’s <span class="booktitle">V</span> is the proliferation of ruptures and discontinuities which are easier to plan and integrate in the web-base <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> than in the print <span class="booktitle">WaveSon.nets</span>. The disjunctions and jumps from one element to another become the pathways of forging relationships that gives the work its coherence. This aspect of Strickland’s work can be understood better through the comments Deleuze and Guattari (1996) make on the role of breaks and ruptures in a literary work. The ruptures and breaks are “productive, and are reassemblies in and of themselves. Disjunctions by the very fact that they are disjunctions, are inclusive” (42). Through ruptures, breaks and discontinuities, many disparate perspectives and viewpoints come together in the unified representational space without getting subsumed into a totality. The fragments retain their identity even as they forge relationship with one another to constitute a whole, which is constantly changing. In the impossibility of arriving at a single unified ground or single meaning in a complex shifting world, Strickland’s work becomes an assemblage constituted of heterogeneous worlds, which touch, collide, or interpenetrate. The telescopic multiple perspectives of the one world in the universe are replaced by multiple perspectives of multiple worlds, which actualize as innumerable diverging and converging series. In a digital representational space different meaning worlds come together. Multiple framed spaces are multiple perspectives of not a single unified reality, but rather of multiple worlds where each world has an ontologically different status.<cite class="note" id="note_6">McHale (1992) describes the shift from modernist to postmodernist writing in terms of a shift from the epistemological to the ontological dominant. Postmodern writers are concerned with ontological questions in how the multiple worlds come into existence, how they exist, collide and interpenetrate into one other.</cite></p>
<p>Such complex digital works through privileging multiplicity and heterogeneity provide a more inclusive field of conveying the experience of living in a complex world. This requires a shift in perspective from a vertical depth-based reading that focuses on what the work means to a horizontal surface reading to see how various worlds in the work relate to one another. The meaning-making is thus processual in nature as it traces the movement from one form to another and from one world to another. The relationships so forged tell more about the work, the reader and the writer. What emerges out of this shift is not only how to read a new media work, but rather what it means to live in a world with competing and interpenetrating realities.</p>
<p>Each session of <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span> appears as an oral performance. A performance is contingent upon a variety of factors, the performer, the audience, and the setting where it is performed. Similarly in reading <span class="booktitle">Vniverse</span>, all the above factors come into play as the reader, the machine interface and the database enter into an intricate dance. The onscreen display that materializes as a result of the interplay between the medium, the content, and reader has emergent qualities as it is time-bound and irreversible like an oral performance. The reader used to the stability of print text struggles to grasp the electronic sonnets in their totality by creating a memory theater in her mind, but is continually frustrated in that attempt. Perhaps that is exactly the point that the poet is making. Reading sonnets in the electronic medium is not about mastering the overall structure of the work and where individual sonnets fit, but it is rather to open oneself up to onscreen display and experience the relationships that it reveals. The electronic version thus is isomorphic with the world and the cosmos itself and the reader’s attitude toward it should be the same - to take one sonnet or sonnet fragment at a time and open oneself up to its reality.</p>
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<p>Funkhouser, Chris “Bridge Work: <span class="booktitle">V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una” Electronic Book Review/American Book Review</span> (2003). <a class="internal" href="http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/superdense">http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/superdense</a></p>
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<p>Landow, George P. “Hypertext as Collage Writing.” <span class="booktitle">The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media</span>. Ed. Peter Lunenfeld . Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1999. 150-170.</p>
<p>Lanham, Richard A. <span class="booktitle">The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts</span>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.</p>
<p>McCann, Janet. “V: Waveson.nets, Losing L’una.” <span class="booktitle">Smartish Pace</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.smartishpace.com/home/reviews_strick.html">http://www.smartishpace.com/home/reviews_strick.html</a></p>
<p>Manovich, Lev. <span class="booktitle">The Language of New Media</span>. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001.</p>
<p>McHale, Brian. <span class="booktitle">Constructing Postmodernism</span>. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.</p>
<p>Moulthrop, Stuart. “Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dream of a New Culture.” <span class="booktitle">Hyper/Text/Theory</span>. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994</p>
<p>Muratori, Fred “Intertextu[re]ality” at Electronic Poetry Review #5. <a class="outbound" href="http://www.poetry.org/issues/issue5/text/prose/muratori1.htm">http://www.poetry.org/issues/issue5/text/prose/muratori1.htm</a></p>
<p>Odin, Jaishree. “Image and Text in Hypermedia Literature: The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot.” <span class="booktitle">The Iowa Review Web</span>. Accessed August 16, 2004 <a class="outbound" href="http://www.uiowa.edu/%7eiareview/tirweb/feature/strickland/index.html">http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Eiareview/tirweb/feature/strickland/index.html#</a></p>
<p>Strickland, Stephanie. Into the Space of Previously Undrawable Diagrams: An Interview with Stephanie Strickland by Jaishree Odin. <span class="booktitle">Iowa Web Review</span>. Accessed August 16, 2004 <a class="outbound" href="http://www.uiowa.edu/%7eiareview/tirweb/feature/strickland/index.html">http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Eiareview/tirweb/feature/strickland/index.html</a></p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">V: Losing L’una/ WaveSon.nets</span>. New York: Penguin, 2002.</p>
<p>Strickland, Stephanie and Cynthia Lawson. ;<span class="booktitle">V: Vniverse</span>. <a class="outbound" href="http://vniverse.com">http://vniverse.com</a></p>
<p>Strickland, Stephanie and Cynthia Lawson. “Making the Vniverse by Strickland and Lawson” Accessed August 16, 2004 <a class="outbound" href="http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/strickland/essay/index.html">http://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/strickland/essay/index.html</a> <span class="booktitle">Women, Art, and Technology</span>. Ed. Judy Malloy. Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2004.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/strickland">Strickland</a>, <a href="/tags/manovich">manovich</a>, <a href="/tags/hayles">hayles</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1230 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comThe Gesture of Explanation Without Intelligibility: Ronald Schleifer's Analogical Thinkinghttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/entangled
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Stephen Bernard Hawkins</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2007-09-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><cite class="note" id="note_1">The phrase “The Gesture of Explanation Without Intelligibility” in the title of this essay is taken from p. 163 of <span class="booktitle">Analogical Thinking</span>, where Schleifer uses it in an account of Theodore Dreiser.</cite> The thesis of Ronald Schleifer’s <span class="booktitle">Analogical Thinking</span> is brave. Schleifer claims for the post-Enlightenment period in human history a remarkable achievement. It seems we learned to think differently - very differently. Defending a thesis of such broad scope requires Schleifer to ignore the great differences between such diverse thinkers as Quine, Saussure, Adorno, Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Ricoeur. By skimming quickly across commonalities in the theories they defend, Schleifer attempts to practice the very kind of ‘analogical thinking’ he claims he has recognized. Because distinctions like ‘form and content’ and ‘theory and practice’ are, according to the theory of analogical thinking, no longer useful, the task of communicating ideas becomes extremely difficult. For philosophers who are skeptical of the notion that truth is a matter of the isomorphic correspondence of bits of language to bits of reality, saying anything at all is a painfully difficult task. We experience the powerlessness of words everywhere in our lives, and not least when it comes to trying to speak of <span class="lightEmphasis">what is</span> and <span class="lightEmphasis">what is not</span>. Not for nothing did Parmenides [born 515 BCE] think nothing more could be truly said than the modest claim that “It is.” Saying anything beyond that seems to get us into trouble.</p>
<p>So if the problem of the fit of language to being was taken seriously by the earliest Ancient Greek philosophers, and certainly by the best of them (Plato and Aristotle), we may be surprised to learn that “sometime around the turn of the twentieth century a new mode of comprehension arose supplementing received Enlightenment ideas concerning the nature of understanding and explanation” (<span class="booktitle">Analogical Thinking</span>, 1). Indeed, the emergence of this new kind of thinking will seem even more surprising if we are familiar with medieval philosophy, and specifically the importance of the concept of analogy in the Thomist tradition. Schleifer seems aware that there exists a tradition of thinking about analogy, since he acknowledges it (footnote 3 to page 17). He seems not to take that tradition too seriously. This missed opportunity is of considerable significance for any writer claiming to deal with analogical thinking, but it is particularly unfortunate in Schleifer’s case, since it undermines his thesis regarding the <span class="lightEmphasis">novelty</span> of ‘analogical thinking.’ Citing repeatedly a line from Paul Ricoeur (13, 31, 121, 151), Schleifer distinguishes analogical thinking from the alternative: analogical thinking is a matter of the relation between relations, and not of the relation between terms. But this is simply the Thomist distinction between the analogy of proportion and the analogy of attribution (Bradley, “Transcendental and Speculative Realism in Whitehead,” 159-60). Ricoeur, we can safely presume, was consciously drawing on the resources offered by an old tradition. But Schleifer’s citing of Ricoeur here is equivalent to claiming Thomas Aquinas as an example of a novel post-1900 thinker.</p>
<p>Is it possible that the Ricoeur citation is just <span class="lightEmphasis">one example</span> of this new kind of thinking - that if we could hold all of the various examples together in our mind, we would be forced to acknowledge that something new has indeed come onto the scene? If that were so, Schleifer’s discovery would indeed be remarkable. It would explain a lot about the current state of philosophical inquiry, split as it continues to be into any number of schools and traditions and methods. How would we set about showing that our way of thinking had changed? Schleifer’s method is to overwhelm the reader with the concepts and names of thinkers practicing this new kind of thought. Since ‘analogical thinking’ seems to be a matter of recognizing the ‘similarity’ of disparate elements, this method seems appropriate - certainly far more so than an Enlightenment-style cold and sober consideration of the ideas of any one of these thinkers, for instance. In his introduction, Schleifer promises connections across a large number of fields in the humanities. But the introduction reads like an advertisement for an all-purpose cleaner. Here is what Schleifer promises analogical thinking is or what it can do. (In the interest of fidelity to the original, I will not treat ‘analogical thinking,’ ‘analogy,’ and ‘analogical knowledge’ as though they were interchangeable terms, although Schleifer nowhere effectively distinguishes them. When we read that analogical knowledge is like problem-solving (15), or that analogical thinking is ‘cultural knowledge’ (15-6), we are justified in wondering whether Schleifer is employing these terms with any precision.)</p>
<p>Analogical thinking:</p>
<ol><li>is opposed to Enlightenment thinking, and is consequently not concerned with such Enlightenment preoccupations as accuracy, simplicity, generalizability, reduction, synecdochical hierarchies, equation, and cause and effect (1-3, 8);</li>
<li>is constrained by purpose, structure, and similarity (10);</li>
<li>encompasses the general quest identified by Klee - ‘to discover the essential nature of the accidental’ (11);</li>
<li>“superimposes” readings on other readings, contexts on other contexts (6);</li>
<li>accomplishes the “ ‘work’ of the negative” (11);</li>
<li>is Ricoeur’s “synthesis of the heterogeneous” (13);</li>
<li>is the “ ‘networking’of the understanding” (13);</li>
<li>is the resemblance between relations rather than terms (13);</li>
<li>is “cultural knowledge that brings together complementary parts and wholes, individuals and collectives, moments and sequences, in order to make provisional sense and achieve constellations of ideas and what Donna Harraway calls ‘situated knowledges’ ” (15-6);</li>
<li>is knowledge conceived as event (23);</li>
<li>“suggests trajectories to pursue rather than resting places to inhabit” (24);</li>
<li>has “contradiction” as one of its properties (24);</li>
<li>“is not reductive, or at least not reductive once and for all” (24).</li>
</ol><p>Analogy:</p>
<ol><li value="14">never “ ‘forgets’ its linguistic nature” (3);</li>
<li value="15">marks both difference and likeness (4);</li>
<li value="16">“stands between language (conceived as systematic semiotics) and the world (conceived in terms of more or less collaborative action)” (4);</li>
<li value="17">“traffics in constellations of wholeness” (4);</li>
<li value="18">is, or is comparable to, paraphrase (8), complementarity (9);</li>
<li value="19">has as its chief “features”: “presentation of alternatives,” “plurality and redundancy,” and “repeated, if momentary, apprehension of wholes” (9);</li>
<li value="20">“gathers together scattered factors and, to one degree or another, judges the importance of its gathering” (15);</li>
<li value="21">“calls for a content of apprehended configurations and a method of multiplied narratives” (15);</li>
<li value="22">is somehow distinguished from metaphor (16-7);</li>
<li value="23">does not present positive entities, invariants, or essence, but “insight” and “frameworks of understanding” (24);</li>
<li value="24">is a “species of <span class="lightEmphasis">semantic formalism</span>” (25);</li>
<li value="25">operates as “meaning” and “event” (25).</li>
</ol><p>Analogical knowledge:</p>
<ol><li value="26">“does not reduce difference to the same, nor does it satisfy itself with the contingency and accident of arbitrary likeness” (14);</li>
<li value="27">suspends the law of the excluded middle (15);</li>
<li value="28">is “irreducibly complex” (14);</li>
<li value="29">is not knowledge about reality but “has to do” with reality, acts within reality (14);</li>
<li value="30">is a new historicism (15);</li>
<li value="31">is like problem solving in that it is “timely, purposeful, and local” (15).</li>
</ol><p>It may appear unfair of me to rip from their original context these thirty-one definitions from Schleifer’s introduction. I can only report that it is no easy task to tell from Schleifer’s own glosses what exactly is meant by “trafficking in constellations of wholeness” or “calling for a content of apprehended configurations.” Schleifer never seems to feel any obligation to his reader to sit and analyze his own claims regarding analogical thinking - to draw them together as I have done here and consider what essential claims are hinted at by these expressions. I presume he considers this work similar to the dreaded ‘Enlightenment’ urge that some philosophers continue to have - namely, the urge to push the limits as far as they go, to press on for precision and accuracy where possible. Schleifer’s position is that there are good reasons why we can never hope finally to encapsulate our world in a list of clearly stated propositions. I share this view. Charles Saunders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, two thinkers deeply influenced by the Enlightenment thought of writers such as Kant and Leibniz, share this view. We should never forget that we are using language, that the use of language complicates our encounter with the non-linguistic world. But this fact only means that we must be all the more suspicious when someone (ironically, in true Enlightenment spirit) professes to have discovered a new faculty of mind (analogical thinking) simply because, with a superficial glance, he has seen something in common between two philosophers’ projects or concepts.</p>
<p>Take, for example, Schleifer’s claim that analogical thinking is knowledge conceived as event. We have some sense of what might be meant by the term ‘event’ here: probably what Schleifer intends is to reject the Enlightenment notion of uncovering the real once and for all, such that ‘knowledge’ would be universal and impersonal, the sort of thing that could be stored, say, in a computer and accessed whenever one needed it. By contrast, knowledge conceived as event acknowledges that <span class="lightEmphasis">perspective</span> is ineradicable, that truths are always attached to the time and place in which they emerge. Is knowledge as ‘event’ something new, then? Aristotle’s <span class="foreignWord">phronesis</span> is a kind of practical knowing that takes place in the midst of a wealth of changing worldly phenomena when a human being recognizes instantaneously what action is best in unique and complex circumstances. While it might be so that words can be written down and mouthed by people in any number of situations, the act of speaking a particular group of words might constitute ‘knowing’ only in certain conditions. There might be no words that contain ‘eternal truths’ that would be true just anywhere. If Schleifer’s book is an attempt to show what accepting this thesis would mean for the way we practice ‘knowing’, then his project could be considered legitimate. But Schleifer presents no argument in favor of this thesis - and from the way he writes, one might be inclined to think that the matter was decided already. Is this foreclosure a necessary consequence of claiming that knowledge is event? Does holding this claim mean that we can never provide definitions, that our writing must be vague and unconvincing?</p>
<p>It may, but until we are convinced that knowledge should be “conceived as event” we should exercise some doubt. Toward the end of <span class="booktitle">Analogical Thinking</span>, Schleifer’s eye for similarities leads him to present Michel Foucault and Bertrand Russell as philosophers united in a vision of the world in terms of “events and power rather than things and knowledge” (197). This characterization is misleading. Both Russell and Foucault speak of ‘event,’ but they do not at all mean the same thing by the term. Foucault writes in the tradition of twentieth-century event-theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Martin Heidegger. Although these theorists disagree about details, they agree in conceiving of ‘event’ as a unique and unrepeatable actualization of a spatio-temporal situation. Each present moment is new in a radical sense. For Russell, by contrast, there is nothing ‘new.’ Events that form the timeline from the origin of the universe to the end of time sit there, never changing; nothing new ‘emerges’ in any sense whatsoever. To be is to have some presence somewhere in that massive and unchanging block universe of facts. For Russell, it was possible to have true propositions about the nature of the world, since the world is a static configuration of objects in relation to one another; even the future is already ‘there,’ though inaccessible to us. A proper analysis of propositions, he thought, would lead to the elimination of traditional metaphysical problems and speculation. But ‘event’ as understood by Foucault, Deleuze, Heidegger and others is an example of the kind of metaphysical speculation ruled out by Russell: it is the solution to the problem of conceptualizing active existence without reference to an ultimate condition or ground. For Russell the notion of ‘active’ existence is no more real than are unicorns; for there is nothing active or in motion in Russell’s universe at all: all the facts are already in place, nothing changes, nothing new ‘happens,’ whatever our feeling that the future is yet to be determined.</p>
<p>To present these philosophers as though they were ‘collaborating’ (a favorite term of Schleifer’s) in a special kind of thinking is to ignore the most significant differences between them. If Schleifer’s ‘analogical thinking’ fails to appreciate such important differences, one may rightly wonder whether it is thinking at all.</p>
<p>Schleifer would likely choose Foucault over Russell, if pressed, for Schleifer’s vision of what the humanities are about is premised on a notion of the event more likely to please Foucault: “The humanities - whether it studied literary texts, musical compositions, philosophical treatises, works of art - have always assumed that each object of study was a unique and unrepeatable event” (37). The work of art has indeed served as an exemplary case of the emergence of novelty in time for thinkers like Heidegger and Deleuze, and for such thinkers, the form of presentation becomes a matter of considerable interest. The difficulties one faces in reading Heidegger are well known, and students of such philosophy relax their habit of challenging the author at every turn: one hopes to grasp the meaning as one grasps the meaning of a poem. (There is nevertheless nothing to prevent rigorous second and third readings.) Indeed, the poetic/mystic vision of philosophy in Heidegger, retained by one of Schleifer’s obvious influences, Jacques Derrida, tends to invite a new kind of student to philosophical problems. Philosophers are not the only ones who work in pursuit of truth. By turning philosophy against itself, and showing the unstable nature of philosophical language, Derrida has perhaps failed to pass on to his disciples his discipline: one must respect the texts with which one works in order to learn, but the overriding victory of ‘deconstruction’ has been the loss of this respect for the work of others, and the exaggeration of the value of one’s own contribution.</p>
<p>Schleifer speaks of ‘postmodernism’ as though from a critical distance, but his style shows that he has abandoned the responsibility to be clear, to work hard to express an idea effectively - and it is this irresponsibility that has earned ‘postmodernism’ its poor reputation in some circles. Schleifer writes as though he is interested in collaboration: “[I]t seems to me that our task, in recovering or constructing the intelligibility of our time, is to discover ways of valuing collaborative enterprise” (146). Since Schleifer’s own work is expressly interdisciplinary, and since we can assume from the impressive number of texts he has published that he must value his own work, he can be taken to suggest that our task is to value work like his. But Schleifer fails to be collaborative in two ways: (1) Since he does not work to understand the claims and theories of the philosophers of whom he writes, Schleifer winds up generating his own meaning without their help; and (2) Schleifer’s writing is replete with unnecessary difficulties, and needlessly excludes readers who might be interested in the subjects of which he writes. Concepts are poorly explained. Conclusions are regularly drawn where there are no arguments. It is often difficult to see exactly what is at stake. And it is often obvious that Schleifer cannot make up his mind about what he wants to say: “Information theory encompasses and, from time to time, articulates this situation - our postmodern situation, which is also modern and premodern” (92). We could perhaps forgive Schleifer for wanting to say that we are premodern, modern, and postmodern, if he could (1) make clear the sense he intends for each of these terms, and (2) say why the ‘situation’ we are in should be considered a mix of all three. Nor is this the only time Schleifer entangles himself:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Such superimposition is a nice alternative to the impermeable divides between science and literature that are often posited, the insurmountable differences between <span class="lightEmphasis">modes</span> of knowledge that Davidson and Beneviste describe. It is, I think, a modified concept of Kuhn’s ‘translation.’ Moreover, it points to what I imagine that we, working in the humanities, can learn most from contemporary scientific disciplines. The structures of knowledge in the sciences, as I see it, are at once Kantian and post-Kantian; they might even be, in an important way, pre-Kantian as well (111).</p>
<p>Kantian, post-Kantian and “in an important way” pre-Kantian as well: What is a student to do with writing of this kind? Is the concept of superimposition a modified concept of Kuhn’s ‘translation’? What leads Schleifer to think it might be? How modified? There are no available answers to these questions; analogical thinking seems to recommend that we log our immediate responses to concepts we discover: this reminds me of that, this might be like that, but modified… What does it mean to be Kantian or pre-Kantian or post-Kantian? The problem here is not one of philosophical jargon, or not only. It is not that Schleifer unfairly expects his readers to be familiar with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. It is, rather, that there is no canonical usage of the term ‘Kantian’ which would make the passage cited above accessible; even those of us who have done our philosophical homework are at a loss to say what Schleifer means. But the problem is worse again, for even if it were so that the term ‘Kantian’ meant something specific, it would be impossible to guess in what ways the structures of knowledge in the sciences might be Kantian <span class="lightEmphasis">and</span> pre-Kantian <span class="lightEmphasis">and</span> post-Kantian. Which parts of these structures are which? What those of us working in the humanities might learn from contemporary scientific disciplines is that knowledge can be collaborative even when a chemist works by himself in his laboratory, or when a philosopher reflects on the problem of time, <span class="lightEmphasis">if, after one has reflected, one assumes the responsibility of communicating what one has observed</span>. It is sometimes necessary to introduce new terms, to employ figurative language, and to write in a way that is not immediately completely comprehensible to readers of any and all backgrounds. Readers must therefore be ready for the possibility that something at first foreign is in fact striking and new. It is a pity that certain authors abuse those of us who cultivate a humble and charitable attitude toward those who would teach us.</p>
<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p>Bradley, James. “Transcendentalism and Speculative Realism in Whitehead.” <span class="booktitle">Process Studies</span>, V. 23, No. 3 (Fall 1994), pp. 155-90.</p>
<p>Schleifer, Ronald. <span class="booktitle">Analogical Thinking: Post-Enlightenment Understanding in Language,Collaboration, and Interpretation</span>. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/kant">kant</a>, <a href="/tags/interdisciplinarity">interdisciplinarity</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1214 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comThe Riddling Effect: Rules and Unruliness in the Work of Harry Mathewshttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/wuc/dense
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Michael Boyden</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2006-09-29</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Today, on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, writers are still clearing up the debris of that hypermediatized event. How can a contemporary author find the right pitch to confront the unremitting stream of master narratives and conspiracy theories, both reassuring and alarming, that are constantly being uploaded and downloaded on the World Wide Web? What we know about the world today has been programmed in advance by the mass media. In this context, the stubborn and idiosyncratic fiction of Harry Mathews poses an interesting counterpoint to the currently dominant tendency to reduce reality to narrative, and narrative to plot (preferably against America). To the hasty reader (and perhaps we are all in that position), Harry Mathews seems to stand for postmodernism in its most experimental guise, <span class="foreignWord">cum</span> gratuitous game playing, linguistic snags, empty polyglottism and priggishness; in other words, despite their avant-garde profile, the writings of Harry Mathews appear as a curious atavism, the rubbles of a fad that, we are happy to say, is now completely over. The time when novelists could freely wallow in meaningless word play seems long gone: we have touched ground again. The aim of the present Mathews gathering is certainly not to bring “high” postmodernism back to life, or, for that matter, to ironize the rekindled interest among contemporary fiction writers in more traditional narrative structures (which is interesting in itself). Rather, what we have tried to do in collecting these texts is point out the remarkable originality and density of Mathews’s highly underestimated oeuvre as well as its continued relevance in the age of global terror.</p>
<p>As it appears, some of the major concerns that infuse the work of Harry Mathews, and which comprises not just fiction, but also poetry, essays, and numerable translations, are now again at the center of critical debates in literary and cultural studies: the limits of narrativity, the convergence and divergence of fictional and non-fictional realities, the recycling of popular genres and styles, issues of language and translation, and even comparative cuisines. In this <span class="booktitle">ebr</span> thread, we present the reader with an exclusive and highly illuminating <a class="internal" href="../wuc/foreignness">interview</a> with the author, which confirms not just his almost neurotic dedication to the right word in the right place (as well as to people in the wrong place at the wrong time) and his extraordinary wit, but also his scrupulous conviction that fiction can only occupy a meaningful place in our lived reality because it is <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> actually part of it. On top of this, we have been given permission to “reprint” three texts by Mathews himself which reveal his views on the connection between fiction and translation, and how the latter impinges on the latter. The texts are: one short story, “<a class="internal" href="../wuc/vital">The Dialect of the Tribe</a>,” and two essays, “<a class="internal" href="../electropoetics/ethno-linguist">Translation and the Oulipo: The Case of the Persevering Maltese</a>” and “<a class="internal" href="../wuc/efficient">Fearful Symmetries</a>.”</p>
<p>In the conclusion to her chapter on postmodern fictions for the seventh volume of <span class="booktitle">The Cambridge History of American Literature</span>, Wendy Steiner argues that the 1990s have signalled the end of the experimentalist period of esoteric metafiction in American prose writing. Whereas outside the U.S. such writings continue not only to be produced but also to be appreciated, Steiner claims that in America critical taste “has moved on” (Steiner 529). As a possible reason for this turn away from self-reflexive fiction, she notes the fact that several of the most renowned American experimenters, notably Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and William Gass, have passed their creative peak. A more compelling factor, however, would have been the so-called “culture wars” in the American academy which seem to have undermined the cultural validity and vitality of postmodern “high” fiction. According to Steiner, the controversies in the universities have resulted in the gradual erosion of the boundaries between “art” and “reality” (530). Further, the development of new media as well as dramatic changes in the marketing of books have made such distinctions between “high” and “low,” or “popular” and “serious,” even more precarious. More and more, apparently, novelists are moving away from elitist game playing and instead are drawing inspiration from mass culture and the lives of “ordinary people” (brackets in Steiner’s text, 535).</p>
<p>If we should take Steiner on her word, any discussion of the work of Harry Mathews, which has sometimes been identified as postmodernism in its most experimental guise, risks being anachronistic from the start, or perhaps even superfluous (indeed, despite his considerable oeuvre, the <span class="booktitle">Cambridge History</span> nowhere even mentions the author). Yet, as I hope to show below, these are unworthy epithets for a writer of the stature of Harry Mathews who has figured at the cutting edge of literary “experiments” - excuse my use of such a backward term - for more than half a century now. I will not go into Steiner’s analysis of the literary historical situation, which no doubt has a lot to say for it, except that her analysis seizes an at best partial understanding of a deep-rooted structural drift in U.S. society to explain a mere alternation of generations in the literary institution, giving it the weight of destiny. It is undoubtedly the case that the rise of giant chains such as Barnes &amp; Noble has had a strong impact on how people read and what gets published. It is also true that Dalkey Archive Press (which has published or reprinted many works by Harry Mathews) was founded in 1984, in the midst of this development towards group-targeted book consumption.<cite class="note" id="note_1">See Paul Harris’s <a class="internal" href="../wuc/generative">review</a> of three Mathews novels republished by Dalkey Archive.</cite> What should be clear is that the symptoms of increasing mediatization and democratization, if that is what it is, are much more complex and go much further back than Steiner’s essay conveniently suggests.</p>
<p>What, one could ask, might the current turn to reality in American prose writing entail? We may begin with the trivial observation that a “turn” is always also - at least in part - a “return” to a state <span class="foreignWord">quod ante</span>, which means that it belongs in a tradition which we have to acknowledge as “real,” even if it is not reality pure and simple. As it appears, in the context of fiction writing in the U.S., this tradition goes a long way back. From early on, American authors have wanted to write books that were not bookish, but somehow reflected the reality of the nation (even if it did not yet exist). In a sense, the American tradition has always been opposed to the very idea of tradition. In the 1960s, the confessional poets propagated a turn away from New Critical dogma towards a closer approximation of the “personal” in poetry. For the New York poets, however, the confessionals had not come closer to life but had moved away from it by obviating the impersonality of modern life, as well as the reality of the written word itself. Some of these New York poets, in their turn, are now under fire for being too difficult and elitist, too self-involved to confront the realities of the postindustrial age. As it appears, the clash between “minimalists” and “experimenters” is not typical of the current situation, but rather results from a non-stop pendular movement that has characterized the American tradition almost from the start and that has paradoxically secured its relative stability. So have we “moved on”? Because this question can only be answered from <span class="lightEmphasis">within</span> the literary institution itself, every answer will to some extent reinforce the distinctions it is supposed to dismantle.</p>
<p>A more compelling question, then, may be how the “turn to life itself” is realized in fiction. It is a fact that a book by Mathews can be a frustrating read, as it constantly eludes our generic expectations without apparently replacing them with alternative ones (contrary to some critics, I do not see the short stories as a key into the longer prose which to me seems more bound to the strictures of narrativity, and thus lets in more “reality”). It should be stressed, though, that Mathews has never attracted a broad audience, not even among devotees of formal innovators of the likes of Pynchon (whose bleak worldview he certainly does not share). Judging from the modest reception of his work in the U.S., Mathews seems particularly out of key in that country. One could argue that, in the American context, his writings appear at once too much at home and at the same time too foreign to really fit in. Contrary to many now popular authors, Mathews comes from a typically WASP background, a fact that he himself has repeatedly identified as an imposing “constraint” on his creative energies. Admittedly, the members of the New York School, with whom Mathews is often associated (during the sixties, Mathews worked with John Ashbery on the journal <span class="booktitle">Locus Solus</span>, the title of which betrays a shared admiration for the work of Raymond Roussel), came from a similar milieu but they at least could be classified as gay writers, which perhaps makes them sufficiently marginal to still occupy center stage in the current climate of conversion.</p>
<p>Another factor in the relative neglect of Mathews’s remarkable literary oeuvre in the Anglo-American context could be his association with the OuLiPo, the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, to which he was admitted in 1973 (nominated by his personal friend George Perec). This rather loosely organized Paris-based group, co-founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionais in 1960, was initially a sort of modern chamber of rhetoric which concerned itself mainly with the connections between literature and mathematics. Gradually, however, the cooperative has broadened its scope and has started to focus on all kinds of constrictive patterns in various art forms. In 2002, Mathews was awarded the prestigious Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, a clear indication of his acclaim in the French literary world. Yet, here too, Mathews has remained something of an outsider. Almost invariably, he is presented as the only American author in the OuLiPo since Duchamp (who, obviously, was not <span class="lightEmphasis">actually</span> American). Moreover, Mathews himself has often stressed that, in spite of having lived outside his home country for a long time, he has always considered himself an “American” author. This would be consistent with his activities as a mediator (a new edition of his <span class="booktitle">OuLiPo Compendium</span>, co-edited by Alastair Brotchie, has recently come out).<cite class="note" id="note_2">See Alain Vuillemin’s <a class="internal" href="../wuc/oulipian">review</a> of the first edition.</cite> Although Mathews’s writings contain many, often witty traces of his Oulipian background, I think that this French connection is by no means defining for his oeuvre as a whole.</p>
<p>Thus, to understand the reasons as to why Mathews is so curiously absent from most official histories of American literature, we cannot suffice with external explanations but must look at the oeuvre itself. What, to my mind, speaks from all these writings is a very strong sense of singularity, as well as an equally strong desire to overcome this desire, thus indirectly strengthening it. This could explain Mathews’s peculiar style which strikes the reader as both level-headed and extremely slippery at the same time. Although Mathews resists easy categorization, two characteristics of his work stand out which in the same movement point to two recurrent misunderstandings. The first characteristic is that Mathews’s fiction is much less an example of the misdirected erudition and wordplay that Wendy Steiner now considers outdated than a constantly renewed attempt to undermine all preconceived systems of thought. According to Steiner, contemporary fiction writers are exploring the possibilities of mass fiction to a degree that was unimaginable to the experimental postmodernists. If Mathews is classed among the latter group (even though he clearly disapproves of the label “postmodern”), this statement strikes me as utter nonsense. From the start, Mathews has used the strictures of popular - fictional as well as non-fictional - narrative formats to question the basis of inherited knowledge: the quest (<span class="booktitle">The Conversions</span>), the epistolary novel (<span class="booktitle">The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium</span>), the proverb (<span class="booktitle">Selected Declarations of Dependence</span>), the cookery book, the lecture, the Festschrift, the pedigree (<span class="booktitle">Country Cooking and Other Stories</span>), or the diary (<span class="booktitle">The Journalist</span>).</p>
<p>The second distinguishing feature of Mathews’s fiction, as I see it, apart from the persistent subversion of received narrative genres, is its imposing realism. This point may appear particularly surprising, given that Mathews has often been considered absurdist and surreal, even to the point of being nonsensical. The persistent reader, however, soon realizes that there is more at stake than merely gratuitous game playing. What Barbara Guest has said about <span class="booktitle">Tlooth</span> may point towards a paradigmatic trait of Mathews’s entire achievement: “Gradually we recognize that besides the fervid rompings there is an obstinate realism, like that underlying a comedy of errors, a place where everyone, not only the underdog, has a mistaken identity, a mistaken idealism” (Guest 117). Mathews himself once argued in an interview that what he aims at in his fiction is a sort of “riddling effect,” which urges the reader to stop seeing writing as a more or less adequate representation of the “real world” and to acknowledge its own reality: “riddles have no answers, and when they do, the answer is another riddle” (quoted in McPherson 198). This riddling effect, I think, is the <span class="foreignWord">kwintessens</span> of Mathews’s creative project, which constantly sabotages the inevitable illusion that we can have full-coverage access to life. Its realism, then, paradoxically resides in the exposure of the idea that the written word and the world “outside” can coincide in the same, undivided universe. Reading Harry Mathews means constantly being reminded of a defect in mimetic function, which at the same time hints at a different, somehow fuller reality.</p>
<p>By way of conclusion, let me now try and substantiate the above claims by turning to Mathews’s latest novel, <span class="booktitle"><span class="booktitle">My Life in CIA</span></span> (2005). As the title already suggests, this book clearly draws on what Steiner calls the “master genre” of the present day, namely the testimony or memoir (Steiner 537). Written in a sparse, almost Spartan style, the book discloses an episode in the life story of a middle-aged American author living in Paris by the name of Harry Mathews, who sometime during the early 1970s all of a sudden stands accused of being a member of the CIA. At that point, the supposed truths on which he had built his life start to crumble and his trial begins: “I wanted to play a part in the grand conspiracy of poetic subversion; in fact that was how I justified my life. But how could I get a hearing if people thought I was an ordinary, paid conspirator?” (12). Through the opposition between the “grand” conspiracy of art and the “ordinary” conspiracy of spying for the American government, Mathews thematizes the predicament of the “otherworldly” expatriate writer who, in a moment of personal and political crisis (among other things, 1973 was the year of the coup in Chile), painfully realizes that his world is based on an illusion, a flight from reality. On the surface, this “autobiography” is a dime a dozen, but it should be clear where <span class="booktitle"><span class="booktitle">My Life in CIA</span></span> departs from the currently fashionable non-fictional fiction of the “memoirs of a psychic spy” type (e.g. McMoneagle). In a sense, Mathews too is a “remote viewer,” but in his case it is unclear who is to benefit from his extraordinary psychic abilities or what is so subversive about them. After all, “who can trust a novelist?” (25).</p>
<p>With masterful irony, Mathews lets his protagonist decide to combat the persistent rumor that he is “CIA” by <span class="lightEmphasis">acting out</span> the role that has been forced upon him, and thus transforming himself into a counter-counter intelligence agent. The character then starts his search for a respectable “cover,” so as to hide his virtual intelligence work from the outside world, and thus, paradoxically, to <span class="lightEmphasis">uncover</span> the absurdity of the rumor that he is “CIA.” In order to face reality, Mathews has to start lying about his identity - not coincidentally, <span class="booktitle">Apprendre à mentir</span> is the title of a TV program cursorily mentioned in the novel (84). He starts an international travel counsel which allows him to draft fake maps of secret geographical sites, and which he conveniently names after the journal <span class="booktitle">Locus Solus</span>. If anything, it is testimony to Harry Mathews’s superior self-mockery that he here associates the avant-garde journal that he helped to establish with a <span class="foreignWord">bona fide</span> bourgeois cover for intelligence operations. At a moment when his writing career is stuck in the morass, his love life is a mess, and his money is running out due to the devaluation of the dollar, the protagonist of <span class="booktitle"><span class="booktitle">My Life in CIA</span></span> is faced with the question: how to keep on believing in the “grand” conspiracy of art? Art is a lonely place. Contrary to what Steiner’s typology would suggest, therefore, Mathews’s fiction is more than a mere illustration of the apparently growing gap between art and reality; it also <span class="lightEmphasis">reflects on</span> this development, but without suggesting easy solutions.</p>
<p>Initially, the protagonist relishes his new life as a pseudo-spy: “it made me less vulnerable to public events. Writing had only rarely done that for me. In fact it had been writing that had first painfully exposed me to world affairs” (58). Whereas, before, being a writer had seemed an alternative to bourgeois life, the excitement of being involved in something secret and important - even if it was only play-acting - now exposed this romantic idea of the solitary artist versus the world as an illusion. One could even argue that, in the novel, writing is what <span class="lightEmphasis">makes</span> Mathews middle class - “Monsieur s’embourgeoise,” as one of his ex-lovers at some point teasingly remarks (89). Very soon, however, the character gets stuck in an inextricable web of intrigues, whereby he apparently becomes the plaything of radical groups both on the left and the right who, in the apparent knowledge that he is a fake spy, try to scapegoat and even eliminate him to equalize their mutual debts (or is all this a pathetic joke of his Paris friends?). His life as a double agent, his supposed grand scheme which was going to dispel the idea that he was working for the CIA by paradoxically exposing his intelligence activities, eventually entirely robs him of the possibility of individual agency. “My game had to end. I’d go back to being the fool who kept denying what he was supposed to be. Better to be taken for a fool than an accomplice. I’d been a fool anyway thinking I could play spy and not pay for it” (149). Ironically, what settles his hash are precisely those things which before had lifted his life from “ordinary” existence: love of women, good food, and modernist poetry.</p>
<p>Harry Mathews is sometimes portrayed as a skillful creator of witty but ultimately trivial game narratives. However brief and partial, the above reading of <span class="booktitle">My Life in CIA</span> indicates that this point of view fails to do justice to the lighthearted seriousness of Mathews’s art, as well as its almost maniacal precision, wit, and originality. The OuLiPo connection is clearly recognizable in Mathews’s fiction, but this presence by no means exhausts the complex texture of Mathews’s writings. To put it differently, our work is not finished once we think we have unravelled a hidden pattern. Rather, these devices merely serve as a reminder of the reader’s own presence in the novel. Thus, for instance, <span class="booktitle">My Life in CIA</span> contains an excruciatingly funny numerical palindrome, when at a certain point the protagonist addresses an audience of dyslexic travelers with departure anxiety: as a cure, he suggests that they pick those departure times that read the same right to left as they do left to right. However, the insertion of this palindrome is more than gratuitous frivolity. The talk about departure anxiety was delivered at a meeting of the AARO, the Association of Americans Resident Abroad, which thus indirectly points to the protagonist’s own predicament as an American-living-abroad. Perhaps it also reflects his own inability to tell left from right, since the reading puts him in touch with Patrick Burton-Cheyne and Marie-Claude Quintelpreaux, two characters who in the end appear not to be what he thought they were.</p>
<p>At the end of <span class="booktitle">My Life in CIA</span>, we pick up the trail of the Mathews character in 1991 when he is residing in Berlin on a fellowship of DAAD, the <span class="foreignWord">Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst</span>. One day, he enters a local restaurant called Paris-bar, “feeling pleased I hadn’t lost my way” (202). Having taken his seat, he overhears a conversation between two men who are talking about his alleged CIA past. On being asked, one of them says: “I know he was CIA. That wasn’t really the problem - lots of people are CIA. He was also a space cadet.” Being CIA here seems to entail being “American” and accepting the consequences. (the “space cadet” may refer to Robert Heinlein’s 1948 juvenile novel of the same name, or even to a 2005 British TV show <span class="booktitle">Space Cadets</span> in which unsuspecting contestants were trained to become space tourists, not knowing that this was a hoax.) But “accepting the consequences” is precisely that at which the protagonist of <span class="booktitle">My Life in CIA</span> is particularly bad (perhaps not so much unlike Joseph K. in <span class="booktitle">Der Prozess</span>). At least, the man on the other table suggests as much when he claims that, after having messed things up, Mathews had to be “terminated with extreme prejudice” (203). The last line of the fictional memoir reads: “There was not the slightest doubt that this man was telling the truth.” This sentence par excellence reveals the supreme realism of Harry Mathews’s fiction: when it excludes all doubt - or, as it says in the quote from St. Augustine’s <span class="booktitle">Confessions</span> that functions as one of the book’s epigraphs (the other is tellingly a quote from the novel <span class="lightEmphasis">itself</span>), when there are “no falsehoods to offend me” - every truth sooner or later tends to collide with its opposite.</p>
<p>As I have tried to show in this essay, the preoccupation with the paradoxical quest for truth, as well as the refusal to finalize it, are remarkable constants in Harry Mathews’s art. In my opinion, it is also what sets his writings apart from the stream of 9/11 novels now flooding the literary market. From the start, Mathews has tried to complicate our understanding of reality and how to represent it. For instance, in his second novel <span class="booktitle">Tlooth</span>, first published in 1966, he lets one of his characters exclaim that “impatience in solving riddles often overlooks what is plain in its quest for the mysterious” (66). As Mathews himself has suggested, “tlooth” can be interpreted as a sort of contamination of the word “truth,” as a Chinese person might pronouce it, and “tooth,” which is a recurring motif in the novel. More than just a nonsensical word, “tlooth” points towards the pointlessness of any pursuit for the ultimate truth. In its clumsy monosyllabic physicality (the word is uttered almost in passing half-way in the novel by an oracle, whose voice issues from a bog), it seems to indicate that the truth can never reach us undiluted: no pain no gain (in the novel, pain takes the form of a deadly toothache). In a conversation with Warren Leamon, Mathews once described his literary endeavor as “an endless and never-to-be-concluded battle against the legion of answer-gatherers” (Leamon 66). Following recent world events, this legion of answer-gatherers seems to have swollen incrementally; consequently, truth itself has sunk deeper into the muddy morass of meaning.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Guest, Barbara. “Tlooth.” <span class="booktitle">The Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 7:3 (1987): 117-118.</p>
<p>Heinlein, Robert A. <span class="booktitle">Space Cadet</span>. Illus. by Clifford N. Geary. New York: Scribner, 1948.</p>
<p>Leamon, Warren. <span class="booktitle">Harry Mathews</span>. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.</p>
<p>Mathews, Harry. <span class="booktitle">The Conversions</span>. New York: Random House, 1962. (1st Dalkey Archive ed. 1997)</p>
<p>—, <span class="booktitle">Tlooth</span>. Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Paris Review Editions, 1966. (1st Dalkey Archive ed. 1998)</p>
<p>—, <span class="booktitle">The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium and Other Novels</span>. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. (1st Dalkey Archive ed. 1999)</p>
<p>—, <span class="booktitle">Selected Declarations of Dependence</span>. Illus. by Alex Catz. Calais: Z Press, 1977. (1st Sun &amp; Moon ed. 1996)</p>
<p>—, <span class="booktitle">Country Cooking and Other Stories</span>. Providence: Burning Deck, 1980.</p>
<p>—, <span class="booktitle">The Journalist: A Novel</span>. Boston: D.R. Godine, 1994. (1st Dalkey Archive ed. 1997)</p>
<p>—, <span class="booktitle">My Life in CIA</span>: <span class="booktitle">A Chronicle of 1973</span>. Normal; London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005.</p>
<p>Mathews, Harry and Alastair Brotchie. <span class="booktitle">The OuLiPo Compendium</span>. London: Atlas Press; Los Angeles: Make Now Press, 2005.</p>
<p>McMoneagle, Joseph. <span class="booktitle">The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy</span>. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Co, 2002.</p>
<p>McPherson, William. “Harry Mathews: A Checklist.” <span class="booktitle">The Review of Contemporary Fiction</span> 7:3 (1987): 197-226.</p>
<p>Steiner, Wendy. “Postmodern Fictions, 1970-1990.” Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. <span class="booktitle">The Cambridge History of American Literature</span>. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1999. 425-538.</p>
<p>Zeppotron. <span class="booktitle">Space Cadets</span>. Pres. Johnny Vaughan. Channel 4. 7-16 Dec. 2005.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/boyden">Boyden</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-boyden">Michael Boyden</a>, <a href="/tags/guest">Guest</a>, <a href="/tags/dalkey-archive">dalkey archive</a>, <a href="/tags/911">9/11</a>, <a href="/tags/9-11">9-11</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodernism">postmodernism</a>, <a href="/tags/postmodern">postmodern</a>, <a href="/tags/oulip">oulip</a>, <a href="/tags/new-criticism">new criticism</a>, <a href="/tags/new-york-poets">new york poets</a>, <a href="/tags/gay-writers">gay writers</a>, <a href="/tags/ashbery">Ashbery</a>, <a href="/tags/roussel">roussel</a>, <a href="/tags/queneau">queneau</a>, <a href="/tags/duchamp">duchamp</a>, <a href="/tags/conspiracy">conspiracy</a>, <a href="/tags/mathews">mathews</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1150 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com